A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
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A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
1–10 of 181 posts
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#2Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me.
As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#3Sensationalism. That's routine collection management.
Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#4Sensationalism. That's routine collection management. Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered.
Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. Objecting to this trend is still very much appropriate.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#5Sensationalism. That's routine collection management. Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered. Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has f…
You're confusing the other library in the article with the (unnamed) one mentioned in the title, the Chester Fritz Library.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#6Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me. As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphon…
any system with pages you "turn" certainly feels very different to reading a webpage (or PDF) with free vertical scrolling
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#7A given library system should have a "last copy" policy, and should keep at least one copy of each book which has been added to their collection --- any which can't afford that need more funding.
>Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert
When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its contents.
Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul.
>A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect) --- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton
c.f.,
>No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet Beecher Stowe
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#8Sensationalism. That's routine collection management. Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered. Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has f…
Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#9Don’t worry everyone, the Ministry of Truth will make sure we know what we need to know.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#10My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place.
I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.