Comment by stephaniepier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephaniepier | Hacker News Reader

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Having worked in libraries for many years, weeding is a very contentious issue. Many patrons (and librarians!) have an emotional attachment to books, so to recycle them just feels wrong. Some libraries have resorted to putting their weeded books into locked dumpsters - there have been instances of patrons coming across a dumpster full of weeded books then going on a tirade against the library for "throwing away knowledge."

A lot of people don't realize the detailed process that goes into deciding to weed a book. When was it last checked out? How does it compare to other materials in the collection? How many copies of this book are available regionally, nationally? What's the monetary value of the book? Is the subject matter outdated, and if so, does it still have value? It's a very complicated process and unfortunately libraries simply aren't able to keep every book, nor should they!

As a compromise I've seen some libraries offer weeded books for very cheap or even give them away for free, which seems like a good way to please both sides.

The library at the university I attended as an undergraduate threw out (3 or 4?) volumes of TAOCP but kept "the magna guide to SQL" or some crap like this.

Their justification was that TAOCP had never been checked out. Which is funny because the year prior when I tried to check out a volume, they told me it was a reference book and could not be checked out.

I'm still completely confused about how that decisions was actually made, and why the books weren't given away or sold.

The manga guide to Calculus is a great book. It helps me reason on a topic that is hard for me to grasp. Someone must think SQL is a difficult topic too.

TACOP is extremely dense and put me to sleep every time I tried to read it. I recently donated my copy of 0-4 to my work library, where nobody was interested in reading it.

The fact that we both have opposite views of your example books shows that this is a difficult process for librarians.

I worked through Chapter 1 back in college, now over a decade ago, with a professor of mine one summer. It was a great introduction (and led us to Concrete Mathematics) for me to a lot of topics regarding algorithmic thinking and discrete mathematics.

That said, I never worked through the remaining chapters of the series, and likely never will. It's a reference book. Read the sections as they pertain to you. For instance, TAOCP was my introduction to sorting networks. This led to direct, measurable, improvements in a few embedded programs (where consistent, deterministic behavior, and optimal behavior, were strongly desired).

I mean, few people ever read a dictionary. I still have one on my desk at home and at the office. This isn't substantially different (though I do recommend skimming it so you are aware of what resources it contains for later reference).

I briefly worked in a public library and the problem they had was that there's no practical way to maintain sufficient numbers and depth of subject-matter experts who can answer the subjective assessment such as you list.

Ideally one or two shallow-SMEs in each field would be maintained over a region, but that will never happen.

So you end-up with librarians making retention decisions based on what publications tell them are the "most useful" books in a topic area and trying to correlate that with check-out frequency. But those topic areas are coarse-grained like 'history of aviation' or 'web programming'. It's a crap-shoot and unfortunately a lot of good books are weeded instead of the dross.

My cheap solution: non-fiction is retained until a updated edition is purchased ( or forever if that doesn't occur ), non-curriculum fiction is weeded after 50 loans regardless of replacement. Curriculum fiction such as Shakespeare probably shouldn't be weeded, just replaced.

Right - "subjective assessment" being the key here. Hopefully each criteria is considered at least a little bit, but even experts are going to disagree on what's worthwhile to keep. Beyond that, many libraries out there have very limited time/resources to make weeding decisions.

But with your cheap solution, how do you avoid running out of space? (And if your space can grow, don't you still end up needing more hours of work to manage the ever-growing collection and more money to just physically maintain the larger speace?)

Apropos of nothing...

One of my mates was a DJ. He had the rule of 100. He only owned 100 records. Whenever he bought a new one, he had to purge another, to stay at 100. Some tough choices were made.

My local library auctions their books. The books I donate get added to the pile. Extras are probably bought in bulk by Powell's or thriftbooks.com

Here in Finland all libraries seem to have a small shelf of weeded books free to take (or sometimes about 1-3€ each) next to the exit. I honestly thought it would be the same everywhere else.

That seems to be the case with our excellent public library in Los Alamos. I got one of my favorite Maths textbooks there for about 3€ (was five bucks).

> As a compromise I've seen some libraries offer weeded books for very cheap or even give them away for free, which seems like a good way to please both sides.

Another option might be to try putting them on the "library book sale" shelf for ultra cheap... if that's legal.

This seems like a perfect use case of google books.

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