The New Yorker: Weeding the Worst Library Books

April 26, 2016
by Daniel Gross

Weeding the Worst Library Books

Last summer, in Berkeley, California, librarians pulled roughly forty thousand books off the shelves of the public library and carted them away. The library’s director, Jeff Scott, announced that his staff had “deaccessioned” texts that weren’t regularly checked out. But the protesters who gathered on the library’s front steps to decry what became known as “Librarygate” preferred a different term: “purged.” “Put a tourniquet on the hemorrhage,” one of the protesters’ signs declared. “Don’t pulp our fiction,” another read.

In response, Scott attempted to put his policy in perspective. His predecessor had removed fifty thousand books in a single year, he explained. And many of the deaccessioned books would be donated to a nonprofit—not pulped. Furthermore, after new acquisitions, the collection was actually expected to grow by eighteen thousand books, to a total of nearly half a million. But none of these facts stirred up much sympathy in Berkeley. A thousand people signed a petition demanding that Scott step down—and, in the end, he did.

Public libraries serve practical purposes, but they also symbolize our collective access to information, so it’s understandable that many Berkeley residents reacted strongly to seeing books discarded. What’s more, Scott’s critics ultimately contended that he had not been forthcoming about how many books were being removed, or about his process for deciding which books would go. Still, it’s standard practice—and often a necessity—to remove books from library collections. Librarians call it “weeding,” and the choice of words is important: a library that “hemorrhages” books loses its lifeblood; a librarian who “weeds” is helping the collection thrive. The key question, for librarians who prefer to avoid scandal, is which books are weeds.

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, two Michigan librarians, have answered that question in multiple ways. They’ve written a book called “Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management,” which proposes best practices for analyzing library data and adapting to space constraints. But they are better known for calling attention to the matter with a blog: Awful Library Books.

Kelly and Hibner created the site in 2009. Each week, they highlight books that seem to them so self-evidently ridiculous that weeding is the only possible recourse. They often feature books with outlandish titles, like “Little Corpuscle,” a children’s book starring a dancing red blood cell; “Enlarging Is Thrilling,” a how-to about—you guessed it—film photography; and “God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents.”

Sometimes it’s the subject matter that seems absurd. Of “Wax in Our World,” a nonfiction book for young adults, Kelly said, “Who came into a publisher’s office and said, ‘You know, the kids really need a book about wax’?”

Kelly and Hibner came to value weeding when working at a library in Detroit, in 2008. “Most people that come into a library are looking for a new job, or they’re facing a financial crisis, or they’re trying to do research on a medical problem,” Kelly, who has worked in libraries since 1998, told me. Unfortunately, the library’s career and medical shelves were cluttered with outdated material. “People were picking up books from the seventies on how to find a job,” she recalled. “We were going to the résumé shelves and finding things that would tell you to put your height, weight, and marital status on your résumé,” Hibner added. “We were like, we can’t give this to people.”

“It’s not free to keep something on the shelf,” Ann Campion Riley, the president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, told me. According to Riley, weeding goes back at least to the medieval period. “There are writings where the monks are saying, ‘Should I keep this? Should I keep that?’ ” These questions are pragmatic, but profound—and they have been joined by new ones, such as, should libraries phase out physical books and move their holdings online? The trouble, as Jamillah Gabriel, a librarian at Purdue University, explained, is that “there’s not always an e-book for everything.” Digital libraries are becoming more popular, but they’re not on pace to replace tangible books anytime soon.

When Hibner and Kelly worked together, they had a goldfish they named Ranga, after the Indian scholar S. R. Ranganathan, whose “Five Principles of Library Science,” first proposed in 1931, are still frequently cited today. “No. 5 is, the library is a growing organism,” Hibner said. This conception of libraries—especially public libraries, where universal access is more important than permanent preservation—explains the metaphor of weeding.

When I asked about what happened in Berkeley last year, Kelly and Hibner said it helps, from a public-relations standpoint, to weed gradually. “I pull one or two books a week. Nobody’s going to even question that,” Hibner said. She also keeps a bag of her favorite weeded books under her desk—“Vans: The Personality Vehicle,” “Be Bold with Bananas”—in case any inquisitive patrons want examples.

Some of the books Kelly and Hibner highlight seem so bizarre as to be worth keeping. Shouldn’t everyone have a chance to flip through “The Psychic Sasquatch and Their UFO Connection”? But public libraries aren’t designed to preserve unusual texts, they said. “There are places where you want to hang on to the weird stuff of our culture. That’s in museums and archives,” Kelly told me. “Keeping a bunch of crap on a dusty shelf is not preserving anything,” Hibner added.

Awful Library Books caught on quickly: within a year of launching, the site had been featured on Time.com, CBC Radio, and Jimmy Kimmel’s TV show; the site’s Twitter account now has eleven thousand followers. Hibner and Kelly figure that the site will eventually outlast its usefulness, but for now they still get submissions every day—such as “Should a Therapist Have Intercourse with Patients?,” by Arthur Seagull, which was sent in a few months back.

Hibner and Kelly both emphasized that many factors come into play when deciding which books should be kept. You want your books to reflect the community you serve, but the popularity of a book is by no means the only barometer. At Hibner’s library, “War and Peace” has been checked out just five times in the past twenty-two years. “It’s huge; it’s taking up quite a bit of space,” Hibner said. “But for libraries like us to not have ‘War and Peace’ at all—it doesn’t seem right.” Something tells her that Tolstoy is not a weed.

Source: The New Yorker