The Pima County Public Library deserves much praise for the access to meeting rooms and Internet terminals that it offers the public, not to mention the many literary and educational events that it hosts.
Sadly, however, it is not so deserving of praise in regard to its book collection—that mainstay of a library.
According to a 2009 survey by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, our library ranks 28th, next to last, in the number of printed materials per resident among the 29 public-library systems that serve populations comparable to that of Pima County. This ranking is especially troubling because our library spends a considerable amount of money to buy books. In fact, in the same survey, our library ranked 16th in the amount of money spent on printed materials per resident.
How is it that a library that’s in the middle of the pack when it comes to purchasing books manages to be next to last when it comes to the size of its collection? The answer is simple: It has an aggressive policy of discarding its books.
This policy is apparent in the library’s “weeding guidelines” (yes, that’s what they call it) for discarding adult and teen fiction. According to these guidelines, a novel should be kept in the collection for a maximum of five years, and short-story collections “of famous American and European writers” should only be kept “as long as there are school assignments or general interest in your community.” Indeed, even classics are subject to removal if there isn’t enough popular demand. Such a discard policy may make for great PCPL book sales (we can all buy recent, quality titles by well-known authors for a dollar or two), but it hardly helps our library build a decent collection.
Why our library should pursue such a self-destructive policy is a mystery to me. It would seem to go against the spirit and letter of the library’s mission statement, which says our library should be “a destination and place of discovery that provides abundant print materials.” Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of how our library having fewer books in such subject areas as Chinese trade, solar-panel technology and commercial graphic arts can benefit us economically, any more than having fewer books on how to deal with a diagnosis of cancer can benefit us in regard to our health. And it hardly helps our claim to be a center of culture when our library’s collection is similarly weak in the areas of literature and the arts.
However, when the National Writers Union, of which I am a member, brought this matter before the Library Board last year (the Library Board, whose members are appointed by the county Board of Supervisors, is supposed to advise the library director), the current policy was enthusiastically reaffirmed. But the reasons we were offered, both by the board and then-library director Nancy Ledeboer, don’t make any sense to us. One reason offered was that the PCPL lacked shelf space to retain more books. If this were the case, why are many of the existing shelves in our libraries half-empty? And why did the library recently replace all of its six-shelf units on the second and third floors of the main branch with three-shelf units?
It was also suggested to us that e-books might solve the problem. But e-books, far from being a panacea, may well prove, because of licensing restrictions, to be more difficult and expensive for a library to maintain than paper books.
Pima County deserves a better public library than one that ranks next to last in the number of books per resident. This is especially true when the taxpayers have already paid for books that, if they were kept instead of discarded, would allow our library to have a book collection more representative of the culturally rich and diverse city that Tucson is.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2012.
What do you mean by “discarded?” Do the books go to the landfill, are they sold or what?
I agree completely with the author and decry PCPL’s overly aggressive weeding of non-fiction books as well!
I recently visited a library in the Canadian town of Banff, and was super surprised to see its collection rival the PCPL’s non-fiction collection in general and even beat it especially in the travel and language sections. Stop discarding books.
I agree completely with the column. I don’t read much non-fiction, but the fiction is weeded so rapidly that any titles more than a few years old are hard to get.
Just curious, could you link to the sources you used to write this article? I tried searching the Institute for Museum and Library Services website but couldn’t find anything related to this kind of data.
Oh wait, I found the thing on their site where you can compare stats from different libraries. And man you’re right, we do spend a lot on our books compared to other libraries. If anyone’s interested the comparison tool can be found at:
https://harvester.census.gov/imls/compare/index.asp
I wondered why it was so hard to find older, even popular older, books at the library for myself as well as my children (school-aged and teens). I moved to Tucson 4 years ago, and live on the southwest side of town. I was shocked when I figured out that there are no book stores on the southside. If you Google book stores, 85746 or 06, there is a religious book store, but otherwise no non-religious book stores. We have to go to Walmart or Target to buy books or trekk over to 4th Ave., Barnes & Noble, or Bookman’s if we want a real book store. 4th Ave. is not that far, but it disturbs me that we don’t have a single book store on the southside. This, coupled with the library’s discard policy, only enforces my disappointment with AZ, even somewhat more moderate and/or liberal Tucson. 🙁
–What do you mean by “discarded?” Do the books go to the landfill, are they sold or what?–
The books discarded by the library are sold at the Friends of the Pimaa County Public Library and the money is given back to the library to fund various things the library sponsors.
Not only is the library discarding perfectly in almost mint condition books they refuse to have a security system in place and hundreds of thousands of dollars of books are “walking” out the door never to even have a paper trail of what happened to them. This is called “loss rate” and the PCPL is terrible at this and DVDs, music CDs, expensive art books are goners with folks taking them with no security system to put a stop to this.
On top of this the library has been receiving 6 million dollars a year for their materials budget and almost one million of that is spent outsourcing the book jackets and processing to an out of state vendor. In addition the library is spending almost a million dollars a year on very expensive databases which they purchase on a contract with another poorly run library system — Maricopa County Public Library. To spend one million dollars on databases which don’t earn their keep (use statistics confirm this) borderlines on almost criminal since it’s our taxpayer dollars being misspent.
The big flag in this the horrible management of the library by the Pima County Board of Supervisors with Chuck Huckleberry hiding the money that comes in and refusing to let the City of Tucson have any say in what was a once great library system.
Things should look up since the former director (Nancy Ledeboer) moved on to greener pastures and she was the one gung ho for getting rid of books, making shelves lower, exhorting the staff to go out in the community and push e-books over the print materials.
The library needs to have an audit and release the full statistics of the decimation of the collections from lost, stolen and never returned materials as a result of not having a security system. Even the local Circle K keeps better track of it’s products better than the library. The library is top heavy in management with no one to keep an eye on the till.
Someone also needs to investigate the photocopy revenues that are flowing in — all that money goes to petty cash, no receipts and that brings in over a 1/2 million a year with no paper trail. This is beyond the pale and that 1/2 million could fund a decent security system which the library had spent over a million putting in place before the former director dismantled it one month on the job back in 2005.
The collection development policy currently in use by the PCPL was put into place when the City of Tucson ran the library system. Former library director Agnes Griffen and her predecessors were the ones responsible for these policies. Years ago the El Pueblo branch had a great Chicano Studies collection. Then one day, the librarian was shoved aside and in came Agnes and her little army and gutted it. It’s shameful what’s happened to our library system. I remember very fondly how it was once stocked with practically anything you’d want. This was when it was located on S. 6th Ave, way before the mausoleum on Stone Ave. was built.
Counting books and bookshelves today is akin to counting horseshoes and blacksmith shops 100 years ago. These are examples of transformative situations.
The Institute of Museums and Library Services recognized a number of transformations in its Public Libraries Survey Fiscal Year 2009 published in October 2011 (available on-line at http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/News/PLS2009.….
In the Executive Summary (page 15), it states in part:
“The nature and composition of collections in U.S. public libraries is changing, indicating the more varied types of materials found in modern public libraries. Although the volume of print materials has decreased over the past 10 years, collections overall continue to grow because of increases in the number of audio, video, and electronic book materials.
The role of public libraries in providing Internet resources to the public continues to increase. The availability of Internet-ready computer terminals in public libraries has doubled over the past 10 years. Internet PC use has also increased.”
A few observations to consider: (1) by the time a book is published, the material is often out of date, (2) video clips of art or travel are much more impactful than a two-dimensional photo in a book, and (3) the Encyclopedia Britannica embraced on-line publication and ceased printing books in March 2012.
Perhaps this is the time to consider forward looking metrics with which to evaluate our library system.
To try and redeem the PCPL’s discard policy by calling on the panacea of ebooks and digital “transformations” is, I believe, a mistake. First of all, the PCPL policy of maintaining a poor book collection predates any meaningful use of ebooks, and so why should we think it do any better with ebooks? In fact, it could well be worse, as the publishers, always frustrated that they would sell a book to a library that would then be read innumerable times without any profit going to them, have banded together and are holding firm in their requirement that a library can only license an ebook from them for so many downloads (I believe the figure is 28), and then must buy the ebook again. PCPL itself acknowledges the serious problems it is facing regarding ebooks in this and other regards on its website (http://www.library.pima.gov/about/news/?id…), and so it is hardly possible to put this forward as a solution.
The other points here are also highly conjectural. Yes, there are a few books on highly specific and topical subjects that might be out of date by the time they’re published, but this doesn’t apply to the vast majority of books being published and read; to state that video clips of art are much more impactful than a two dimensional photo doesn’t describe any meaningful experience of looking at, e.g., a painting by Van Gogh that I would recognize; and, yes, encyclopedias and dictionaries, where one is seeking discreet, concrete bits of information, are easier via digital forms, but that hardly applies to all areas of textual endeavor. Indeed, ebooks are having real problems trying to replace, e.g., the visual outlay and accessibility of the modern-day textbook.
In any case, the important point is that our library has for many, many years been quite content to provide Pima County residents with a sub-standard collection of books when no digital alternative exists (and which still doesn’t). Such a library has a philosophical problem that is likely to continue even if there is a digital transformation. In my correspondence with the PCPL it is hard to get at the root of this philosophy, as they use a lot of terminology, such as having a “vibrant” collection (because a lot of books come and go from the collection). My sense, however, is that they have accepted a kind of corporate mentality in that each book must justify its place on the shelf by its popular demand in the same way that Barnes and Noble does, which is why their collection resembles that of a Barnes and Noble bookstore.
What does it say about an over-enthuastic weeding/culling/discard policy when books with a 2011 copyright date (and even 2012 date) are being taken out of circulation? I’ve seen these — they are not in horrendous condition (broken spines, water-damage, etc.), only apparent victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
People need to read more, gripe less! There is a book about that – “A Complaining Free World” by Will Bowen!
Ellice B.
Pima County’s low ranking in the area of print materials per resident is largely due to its being a warm-weather area, with lots of recreational opportunities year-round (as well as being in a state with a tax-phobic conservative government, but that’s another story). The highest-ranking areas, on the other hand, are in colder climates like the Midwest, where you want to have lots of books on hand when you’re snowed in and can’t go outside much.
Public libraries weed, for the most part, on the basis of item condition and circulation statistics. If more patrons treated the items they borrow more gently, libraries would not have to discard so many items on the basis of condition. Also, collection management is an art, not a science. Librarians can make an educated guess as to the circulation potential of a book or DVD, but if an item purchased for the collection stays on the shelf for a couple of years without being checked out, they really have no good reason for keeping it. It all comes down to patron interest. Did you know that tax monies allotted to library systems depend in part on circulation of items? Check stuff out more, and more money will be made available to the system (well, that is how it works in normal economic times). Also, if you as a patron want a particular title that is not in the library catalog, you can always contact the library to request that it purchase the title. If they note a modicum of demand, they WILL purchase it if the budget allows. Most librarians are helpful, caring folks who want their library’s patrons to be satisfied with the services they provide.
I believe that Pima County’s low ranking in the area of print materials is the result of a deliberate policy decision and not due to its being in a warm weather area. Four of the top ten ranking libraries in the Institute of Museum and Library Services survey I cited (out of 29, where we rank 28), after all, are located in California or Florida. And I don’t think that the point that Starcommand makes, to the effect that “Did you know that tax monies allotted to library systems depend in part on circulation of items? Check stuff out more, and more money will be made available to the system…” is applicable to Pima County Public Library. As my article argues, the library has plenty of money to spend on books, and it spends that money, it just gets rids of those books, and very quickly. This policy is made even mysterious by the fact that its shelves sit half empty, so why not keep the many relevant and still contemporary titles that it discards, even if they don’t get checked out as often as the library has determined is often enough?
Being a library employee i feel people should be grateful for us getting rid of materials. If you only knew the condition these books come back in. Some examples would be bugs, blood, food, water damage (which turns into mold and spreads to other books and also causes breathing problems) and many other unkown substances.