Here Today, Gone Tomorrow!
By: Michele, Children's Librarian
Emily Miller Danton wrote in 1939 in her book Library of Tomorrow: "Libraries are never 'finished'; they grow continually, not only because they serve more readers and buy more books, not only because social changes and progress place new and increased demands upon them, but because librarians and trustees have ideas and are not afraid to experiment with them..."
I would like to address a painful topic that we face at the Brigham City library. It is called 'weeding'. Limited space forces a library to cull from its collection items that are damaged, obsolete, unused or under-used. In a perfect world we would never have to get rid of a book, our shelf space would be unlimited, our patrons voracious readers and pages unable to be soiled or ripped. We do not live in a perfect world however.
Each year in the United States over 33,000 titles are published! Of that number our library only purchases a fraction and the sad truth of our situation is that for every book we purchase we must 'weed' another.
As I sat on our recent building committee and we discussed a new building, we spoke of the love people have for our Carnegie Library. "It is part of our community, they wouldn't dare tear it down!" they cried. We agreed, but thought that it could serve the citizens in a new way and allow us to move into a facility in which we would be able to have more books, not to mention dvd's, cd's, internet terminals and meeting spaces. Alas, some who are short-sited spoke loudly against a new building and our bond election failed. Now we face an ugly truth; in our community, money speaks louder to us than the education of our citizens. Proof in that can also be seen in the fact that the school bond failed as well.
So when we think that a library is never finished we must ask ourselves, do we stop purchasing new materials in order to perserve what we have or do we get rid of everything old and only carry new and popular items? I would like to hear what the citizens of our community think about which direction our collection development should go.
In deciding what to remove, the system that we currently use is best described in the acronym MUSTIE: Misleading, Ugly, Superseded, Trivial, Irrelevant, Elsewhere.
If ever you visit the library and ask about a book that you remember reading as a child and we don't have a copy, remember that we once probably did have it and that it was replaced by something else. That is sad, but it is the curse of the Carnegie.
