Strapped Tokyo Governmment Slashes Library Budgets, Collections

From Mainichi:

The cash-strapped Tokyo Metropolitan Government has decided to get rid of some 140,000 books being kept at one of its three libraries as a part of a radical cost-cutting measure.

Under a new metropolitan directive, the libraries will be banned from keeping more than one copy of a single title between them from next April. Any overlapping collections will be offloaded under the directive, but no concrete plan for their fate has been agreed . . .

It is expected that library-related expenditures will be clipped further in fiscal 2002.

More.