On the day before Thanksgiving, I took 139 pretty red hardback volumes of Short Story Criticism off the shelf of the P's in Reference, pushed the heavy cart back to Technical Services, and left it there for discard. I think my boss hoped these literary criticism sets would find good homes at other libraries or collections, because I felt selfish when I made a comment to him about wishing I could take them all home some months earlier.
Yesterday I came back from my lunch break to discover two student workers throwing all 139 pretty red hardback volumes into the dumpster on the side of the library.
It was a visceral shock, and I sure wish I had taken a picture, although I would never want to make the students feel uncomfortable or reticent in that way. Pretty red volumes of Short Story Criticism dotting the grey concrete, the beige bookcart, the shitty dumpster. They had good binding.
I know why we often have to do that: we don't have space to shelve the discarded titles while we wait for interested parties to claim them. It takes a lot of resources to arrange such a thing, including time, patience, and packing materials. It is more productive--more efficient--to put it in the dumpster. When we're talking pragmatism, this is it. But where does the pragmatism of the librarian end and the idealistic shaman begin?
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