![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
8/9/10 13:54I have begun doing an Awful Library Books sweep of the library's adult nonfiction.
We don't really have any "Someday, man may walk on the moon!" howlers -- a look at Bill Gates's management style that stops at Windows 95 is about the size of it -- but we have books that were bought in 2002 and never checked out.
And Real Moments For Lovers which is not up there in the stratosphere of Leonard Nimoy's poetry, but is surely in striking distance of it.
Awful Library Books is hilarious, but most weeding is about the edge cases: it's not a bad book, it's old but the information isn't out of date, the design is dated and I can't imagine anyone wanting to pick it up but we don't have anything better or newer on that topic.
I think there's a specific kind of educational nonfiction, the kind that exists solely for middle school and high school students doing research, that's losing relevance in this age. Not because the books aren't good, but because if you're just doing a three-page paper it's so much easier to find the information you need on the internet than to go to the library on the chance that they might have a book on it... and the books don't have anything extra to recommend them.
So even as I'm thinking, "Can I really get rid of this book?" I'm looking up how many times it's circulated in the last couple of years and thinking, "Yeah, I kind of can."
We don't really have any "Someday, man may walk on the moon!" howlers -- a look at Bill Gates's management style that stops at Windows 95 is about the size of it -- but we have books that were bought in 2002 and never checked out.
And Real Moments For Lovers which is not up there in the stratosphere of Leonard Nimoy's poetry, but is surely in striking distance of it.
Awful Library Books is hilarious, but most weeding is about the edge cases: it's not a bad book, it's old but the information isn't out of date, the design is dated and I can't imagine anyone wanting to pick it up but we don't have anything better or newer on that topic.
I think there's a specific kind of educational nonfiction, the kind that exists solely for middle school and high school students doing research, that's losing relevance in this age. Not because the books aren't good, but because if you're just doing a three-page paper it's so much easier to find the information you need on the internet than to go to the library on the chance that they might have a book on it... and the books don't have anything extra to recommend them.
So even as I'm thinking, "Can I really get rid of this book?" I'm looking up how many times it's circulated in the last couple of years and thinking, "Yeah, I kind of can."
Tags: