A tale of librarians seeking to prevent discards: “To save books, librarians create fake ‘reader’ to check out titles” (Orlando Sentinel, via Arts & Letters Daily).
Reader, have you ever checked out a book to try to save it from being discarded? I will admit to checking out from two libraries, as an adult, the formative book of my childhood, Clifford Hicks’s Alvin’s Secret Code. When one library finally discarded its copy, I was lucky enough to find it at the book sale. But I would rather have found it still on the shelf.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Preventing discards
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There was a (somewhat) related incident in a small town just a few miles from us. The longtime director of the town's public library has been accused of having employees repeatedly check out books in order to inflate circulation figures. The apparent motive wasn't to hold onto particular individual titles but simply to justify the overall library budget. The director has been fired by the library board, and has now taken the issue to court. In this particular small town it has to be the biggest story in years.
The opposite happened in a nearby city: the library began discarding all non-fiction over ten years old (no exaggeration). Public outrage stopped it, and the books that had already been shipped off were recovered.
Now the link goes to the Orlando Sentinel story.
A library branch here sets longtime unchecked-out books on a display table.
Crafty librarians!
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