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Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

Schools are given two options:

+ Remove them from their shelves, and send a letter saying they do not have the books available. This is the cheaper/easier option, and several schools have already opted to do so.

+ Make a count of all the books, provide location information about the storage of the book, including its exact geographic location on their campus, and trawl their records to determine precisely how much they spent on each of the books in an itemised manner [0], and send a report detailing all of this.

[0] Schools receive books generally in either donations, or in groupings that are not itemised, making determining the cost of an individual copy of a book extremely difficult. That's before you get to poor financial record keeping that is also rife in school libraries.

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> This is the cheaper/easier option, and several schools have already opted to do so.

Do you have a source reporting that schools are actually removing books in response to this particular inquiry? It seems that they shouldn't be. (I am aware of other instances of books being explicitly removed from school libraries or curricula by the school boards.)

What makes me skeptical is that I'm not sure in what situation physically removing a bunch of books from the shelves would be cheaper/easier than retrieving records about them.

> What makes me skeptical is that I'm not sure in what situation physically removing a bunch of books from the shelves would be cheaper/easier than retrieving records about them.

Schools don't buy individual books. They buy packages. Those packages are not itemised, and the receipts don't list which individual books you received, just the number of titles in what genres. The people sending the packages don't have that information either.

You make a purchase, and get a guarantee of N titles, in X genres. The warehouse pulls down N titles, in X genres, with varying numbers of each individual title, and then sends that out. The individual titles come from the publisher under wholesale costs, so individual purchases aren't tracked.

The exact costs are further complicated by other discounts that may be applied. Seasonal discounts for different genres, some places will give you discounts if you return covers of damaged books (as proof of destruction), etc.

The records requested may literally not exist, and require the school to compare when entries appeared in their tracking system, as compared to when a purchase was made and received, reverse-engineering those costs.

TBH, that still doesn't make sense to me, but I don't really know much about how school libraries operate in Texas.

I found an example of what you were referring to though (thanks to @shankr linking to a relevant Twitter thread). [1]

[1]: https://www.granburyisd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Dom...

Surely, "unknown" is a possible answer, when some information is literally unknown ?

That is a possible answer if you would like to invite a full scale audit of the school. For obvious reasons, that is not desirable by administrations. The safer option is to remove the material if you cannot be certain.

I would assume that librarians are literally paid to know what books they have

The school makes a purchase of new books from a publisher. They select the "modern teen reading" package, and pay a lump sum for 100 books across nine categories. Some of the books under investigation are in the received package. What was the cost of the individual books under investigation?

Ooh, I know this one - if acquired as a non-itemised purchase, the valuation should be the number of books we care about, divided by the total number of books (100 in this case), multiplied by the total lump sum paid.

However, you acquired three identical items. The lump sum changes each time. You are not sure which of five different purchases these items belong to. How do you determine how much was paid?

I agree that there are some complications, but it is a solved problem, with a myriad of off the shelf asset tracking software solutions. It does add a bit of effort to the unpacking of a shipment, but not beyond what's expected of any retailer.

A school, however, is not a retailer. They likely have not done those things in the past, and so the simplest solution for them is to not do this extra work, and remove the offending items from their shelves.

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