Why Do We Need Public Libraries ?
The Washington Post is reporting that the Fairfax County, Virginia Public Library System is purging books that nobody reads from its shelves:
You can’t find “The Decline 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.
Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region’s largest library system is taking turnover to a new level.
Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library bookshelves — and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone — even if they are classics.
Instead, the local library is starting to resemble the local bookstore:
As libraries clear out titles, they sweep in new ones as fast as they can. A two-month-old program called “Hot Picks” is boosting copies of bestsellers by tracking the number of holds requested by patrons. This month, every Fairfax branch will display new books more prominently, leaving even less space for older ones.
Based on this, and if libraries really do become nothing more than government-run copies of Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon, then one has to wonder why we need to be spending tax dollars on them anymore.
