Some Notes on the Discards

My library is cleaning itself out.

The shelves let more light through each week.

Today I walked into a room full of completely empty shelving.

The empty Government Documents Room

My library is expunging out dated volumes, unpopular titles, materials that are available online or otherwise take up valuable space. I say "my library," but really a bunch of separated ant workers are scurrying about, disassembling a holistic collection piecemeal, with no holistic vision of what will take its place.

In the past year or two, we have discarded thousands of Government Documents, emptying out an entire room. The few Government Documents we have kept are being given LC call numbers and are being integrated into the stacks. The room formerly known as the Government Documents room will be turned into silent study space for students.

We have also discarded many periodicals holdings, mostly on microfiche/microfilm, and have trimmed down the holdings of our daily newspapers. (Last Christmas a large Periodicals work area and service desk were abruptly demolished to make room for conversation study area.)

What issues does any of this raise except for being a tough pill to swallow for the sentimental? New batches of students resupply the University completely every 4 or 5 years, and the students are happy with appearances and comfortable spaces--they love the new study area where the Periodicals desk used to be. I am sure the new silent study space slated for construction in 2015 will be a big hit as well.

Many of us library workers and professors have been here for 5, 10, even 30 or 40 years. Some of us have lent quite a hand in developing these holistic collections.

I can be a sentimental person, which has me cagey about losing these print materials. But what other issues for the profession does this raise?

Baker Nicholson's 2000 New Yorker essay about newspapers and microfilm brings up valid preservation issues and access issues that are rarely sentimental. I summarized the article to a friend and he made a nice joke: "It's old news anyway" -- yes, a cultural decision (a cultural valuation made ad-hoc) that what we don't know doesn't hurt us; that we don't need historic local newspapers.

It's weighing on me like a stone. My gut insists paper will still outlive digital archives, will outlive microfilm. HathiTrust -- a trusted digital repository certified by TRAC in 2011 and OAIS compliant, following all standards for the field -- factors in planned obsolescence by replacing the hard drives of its storage nodes every 3-4 years. Which do you think is more probable in 500 years? That someone replaced HathiTrust's hard drives every four years or that a bunch of paper kept cool and dry is still in good, usable condition?

On the other hand, we need to bring students in, we need to remain relevant in the age of Google. How do we even define library anymore?