Problem Librarians Make Problems for Humanists

Abstract

Problem librarianship in weeding book collections has reached epidemic proportions with serious short‐ and long‐range ramifications for everyone, especially for scholars in the humanities. Although a number of books and articles in recent years have set forth eminently sensible rationales for such weeding, deselection, or deaccessioning (as it is variously called), in actual practice pragmatism shaped by funding exigencies and a new business mentality among librarians generally pro‐duces disturbing results. The business viewpoint has brought fundamental shifts in how things are done, and as Larry N. Osborne suggests in “Hassling Memorials” (Library Journal 662, March 15, 1978), many librarians feel that “strategically the best thing they can do is load the board with young management types.” Such trustees, most of whom slid through school without Latin and maybe without French, and without much history, art, music, or literature either, are doubtless akin to many of the young librarians themselves, if you view the MLS as a weak academic credential. For managers, performance is the bottom line, and it is reflected in numbers—numbers of book circulated, numbers of books requested that are available in a given library, numbers of users of one collection of books within a library vis‐a‐vis other collections, even the cost of keeping a book in the library for a year figured by dividing the library budget by the number of volumes on the shelves. Not many people want to know that it costs $2.47 to keep Athenaeus on the shelves if nobody is reading Athenaeus. Such managers may value an attractive dust jacket over what is inside the book, preferring a small, easy‐to‐carry corrupt text over a ponderous definitive edition.