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Creative Destruction Hurts!
You can't find "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" at the Fairfax City Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch.
It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.
Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.
First Tower, now this. In any case I do not think they are using the correct algorithm; here is more. Circulation figures, by the way, have become a bargaining chip for more government funding. That, plus growing demands on space, explain the ruthless culling underway.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 1, 2007 at 09:08 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
1. Make friends with key library staff.
2. Watch the 12-18 month candidate list.
3. Use your judgement and make key borrowings.
There is a real difference between a lending library and a depository library. Most town libraries are lending libraries. But the algorithm should not be quality indifferent.
Posted by: rjh at Jan 1, 2007 9:20:28 PM
Actually I don't see it as such a bad idea. Might need some tweaking, but I don't expect a muni lib to have everything.
Posted by: Big John at Jan 1, 2007 10:11:41 PM
i had a similar experience this weeked at blockbuster looking for "Chinatown."
Posted by: tof at Jan 1, 2007 10:18:30 PM
If public libraries are going to become just competition for private booksellers, I'm going to have a very hard time justifying their continued taxpayer support.
Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare's plays, "The Great Gatsby" and other venerable titles.
but later in the same article:
Classics such as Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" are among the titles that haven't been checked out in two years and could be eliminated.
Posted by: Steven Andrew Miller at Jan 1, 2007 10:20:35 PM
If a book hasn't been checked out in two years under what algorithm would you want it on the shelf? What about four years? Eight?
Alex
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Jan 1, 2007 10:23:18 PM
It looks as though in some of the cases they're eliminating the books from some branches, not all. If you look, they note that most of the books will still be in some branch, and intralibrary loans aren't that slow. Still, annoying to not have it when you want it-- the very problem of stores like Tower, which needed to stock every classic rare CD in every store in order to "have everything" unlike Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart, but which became a lot more expensive than Amazon having everything in a few warehouses.
Posted by: John Thacker at Jan 1, 2007 10:31:08 PM
With all the interlibrary loan able to spread out the demand so much, this surprises me.
Perhaps the libraries can use an off-site warehouse to feed requests and just keep best sellers in relatively small local branches.
Hopefully at some point in the near future we can get PDFs of anything we want on the internet for free so we won't have to go to the library.
Posted by: Paul N at Jan 1, 2007 10:44:00 PM
The creative destruction in this case is more creation than destruction. Final Harvest is a great collection, and books will always (?) beat computer screens, but all things old are new again.
By the way, it's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Posted by: Trieu Truong at Jan 1, 2007 10:52:14 PM
Good libertarians don't believe in public libraries anyway do they?
Posted by: Andrew Lacey at Jan 1, 2007 11:19:34 PM
Where feasible, offsite storage in inexpensive compact shelving is a good solution for the space-crunched library. As for choosing which books to dump or offsite, computer science tells us that least-recently-used is a reasonable algoritm, but far from optimal. The problem strongly resembles memory or cache management: which page of data should be moved to a slower storage medium? Craig Silverstein and Stuart Shieber have developed a decision-tree algorithm that combines the data of last checkout with a books Library of Congress information to decide which books should be moved out of the main stacks.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann at Jan 1, 2007 11:42:46 PM
The article is maddeningly vague, noting that "the same book might be available at another branch." It seems to me that the Fairfax County system could also prioritize based on the number of volumes available at other branches when deciding what to remove from a branch. It seems like an obvious thing that they may well be doing, but I can't seem to tell from the article.
Posted by: John Thacker at Jan 1, 2007 11:47:02 PM
I can't get too exercised about this, especially since tweaks for quality of books--at least by proxy--are readily available (exempting books on the Modern Library's top 100 lists or on the curriculum at St. John's, for instance). But don't focus on the name-brand books that are being junked; consider instead that many moldering books on, say, technical, scientific, and "personal" (i.e. self-help and relationship) are being deservedly shunted aside.
Indeed, I would think that the real threat to quality here isn't that Hemingway will vanish from shelves--the cultural proclivities of the bluestockings will keep that from happening--but that "mid-major" books won't be preserved; how often, for instance, can anyone be reading the solid but lesser-known books of Dennett or Jonathan Spence, which are precisely the sort of marginal titles that make up a really good core collection? (Anyone with a modicum of education can tell what books are classics, in the nobody-reads-them Mark Twain sense, and anyone who reads the Times knows what the bestsellers are; it takes actual discretion and judgment, however, to decide to order Venkatesh's book on underground economies.)
Posted by: Paul Musgrave at Jan 2, 2007 12:36:17 AM
So what. This is an unstory if I ever saw one. I'll bet most of those classics are available online for free anyway.
The books don't do any good if no one is reading them.
Posted by: beeper at Jan 2, 2007 1:22:14 AM
Is anyone really reading PDF books? I can't get through more than a 10 pages and I fatigue. A good printed book though - no limit.
Posted by: kyle at Jan 2, 2007 4:00:08 AM
Fairfax county is a suburb and so has lending libraries that serve local readers. If you want to access infrequently read books or do research you must go downtown as you must in other cities. There is the King library in DC, the Library of Congress and many private and university collections. It is a shame that no one checks out books like "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire", but maybe it is because so many people own it from their college days.
Posted by: joan at Jan 2, 2007 5:55:16 AM
Might be worthwhile if we could add these authors to that list: Chomsky, Vidal, Michael Moore, Clinton, etc. ;-)
Posted by: Chris Meisenzahl at Jan 2, 2007 6:24:21 AM
The real story is that the English language books are getting replaced by Spanish/non-English books. I visited the Fairfax branch near Tysons corner and I'd say at least half the patrons are hispanic/immigrants.
Posted by: bjanderson at Jan 2, 2007 7:42:18 AM
All available on Amazon.
Posted by: josh at Jan 2, 2007 8:36:32 AM
I have thought about writing a paper that does a social cost-benefit analysis for public libraries. Other than the depository libraries, I cannot see any case for it. There may have been onr prior to the internet, as there may have been with public television before cable, but I cannot see what it is now. Why should I subsidize the reading of other middle class people? This is all the more true as libraries start to also compete with video rental stores and internet cafes.
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Smith at Jan 2, 2007 9:16:41 AM
1. Tyler -- I've never been to GMU, but can't you get just about any book you could possibly want from the University library?
2. If you live near a state university, that's a much better deal than the vast, vast majority of public libraries. E.g., the U. of Delaware has a huge collection and lets state residents borrow for free. Non-state residents (I live nearby in PA) can get a library card for a relatively nominal annual fee ($25 last time I checked).
3. On-line versions of classics still have a long way to go. Ever try to read a bunch of 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper while relaxing on your back? Someone smart at Adobe needs to develop a program that enables you to print out text in a form that can be easily stapled into signatures, such as two columns of text on letter-sized paper (double-sided, landscape orientation), with pages 1 and 8 on one side of a sheet and pages 2 and 7 on the other side, etc., so that you could take the printout, fold it in half, staple down the fold (need a special stapler for that), and maybe trim the edge if you want to make page-turning easier. The program should also allow you to specify the number of pages you want in a signature (in multiples of 4).
Posted by: jp at Jan 2, 2007 9:19:09 AM
Please tell me more about this "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire". I've never checked it out and I don't own it from my college days.
On a related note, Fairfox does have an audiobook of Part I of the classic Gibbon book. I guess the Post writer forgot to look for it, because I found it in one search on the library website.
And now it looks like they've changed the first sentence of the Post article. Curious.
Posted by: Dave at Jan 2, 2007 9:35:52 AM
"Good libertarians don't believe in public libraries anyway do they?"
I don't--not any more anyway. I much prefer the 'virtual public library' that consists of half.com and the amazon marketplace. Buy a used copy for a few bucks, keep it as long as you like (forever if you want) with no late fees, and then resell it or give it away when you're finished. If you resell, all you're out is the shipping--which is a great bargain, given that you don't have to drive to the library to check it out and drive back to return it. Probably much better for the environment, too, since there's no big library building to heat and cool and UPS delivery is much more efficient than driving to and from the library. And you can get ANY book you want and it's always on the virtual shelf (you never have to wait for somebody else to return it).
Posted by: Slocum at Jan 2, 2007 10:27:01 AM
And of course we can't forget that most Borders and Barnes & Noble stores let people browse freely-- and make it comfortable to do so. Barnes & Noble also reprints their own versions of classic books with expired copyrights and sell them cheaply, too. Borders might do so as well.
Since the latest post doesn't have comments working, I'd be interested in hearing Professor Cowen discuss Switzerland in the context of why federalism is unhelpful for small countries, and discuss Japan dominated by Tokyo and France dominated by Paris as relates to the "Nordic countries dominated by their capitals" hypothesis.
Posted by: John Thacker at Jan 2, 2007 10:32:32 AM
This will all be irrelevant when you can print books on demand from a vending machine. The NYC library is testing it out this year.
Posted by: Chris at Jan 2, 2007 1:16:17 PM
Cheap substitutes at BN/Borders/Amazon probably helps. I wonder if displaying circulation information would change books' fortunes. You can sort of tell history from the stamps inside the books, but I wonder if you could improve upon this. For example, suppose we tagged books with RFID; and suppose they distributed a handheld device (maybe a Palm or those digital devices used at museums) that could read the RFID. The device might direct you to where the book is in the library (not just give you a call number, which would be extra useful when you find that a book is supposed to be in the library but isn't or mis-shelved) and tell you info like circulation or any of the other info that Amazon generates for you (if you liked this...; others who bought this...).
Posted by: RSaunders at Jan 2, 2007 1:31:01 PM
