Last December at my previous job we had a massive weed in the last 2
weeks of school. The library was 10 years old and had inherited alot of
books from other libraries when it first opened. We looked at every
title on the shelf in all locations and by the end of it we had
discarded over 3,000 items in two weeks. Most were so old they went to
landfill, but the better ones that we had multiples of were sent to a
charity (although this was a very small percentage of the total as not
many were of an acceptable age, condition or political correctness to do
this.) We had to be very sneaky about the whole process - ripping covers
off old encyclopedias and dumping them seperately, putting discards in
the food bins and letting them get messy, ripping books to pieces - not
all were treated to these extremes of discard but we had to do it so
that people did not know what was going on. Our concern in reselling or
giving them away is that they would come back to us - many people move
from this town and 'clean out' their book collection and dump it on the
library wherte we accept graciously and after an inspection of the goods
is whisked out the back and shelved in the trash.
The response of the kids was quite interesting when they found out what
we were doing ... 'Librarians throwing away books?' I thought that was
against the code of ethics?' "Why are you throwing away books?" It was
an great educating opportunity on the worth of information and "what is
a book worth if no one reads it?" And "just because something is
published doesn't mean it is worthy to be purchased or read or kept for
hundreds of years" and explained the role of the school library.
We kept the process from the teachers as they have a poor record of not
being able to throw anything away and we did not want a rampage of them
taking boooks back to the classrooms - if it isn't good enough for the
library it should not be good enough for the classroom. We actually
managed to abolish the classroom library concept - all students now
borrow through the library for their reading - because we are the
professionals and we have been trained in selecting books - whereas the
classroom teachers have not.
This is a good discussion!
Cheers
Dianne McKenzie
Contract TL
Hong Kong
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