Book Club

[rustee]

Florida librarians were accused of creating fake borrowers to prevent automatic culling of books which weren't being borrowed.  Two staff members were suspended at the East Lake Library.

[QVCkitty1]

I love librarians ! ❤️

[Catiele]

I volunteered at the town library. Part of my work was to box the very old ones. These books were falling apart. I did find a few I wanted to keep. 

[smoky22]

Aww! 

[gardenman]

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@rustee wrote:

Florida librarians were accused of creating fake borrowers to prevent automatic culling of books which weren't being borrowed.  Two staff members were suspended at the East Lake Library.

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It's always a challenge for libraries to find enough shelf space for all of the books. Most libraries don't have rows of unused shelves and there are always new books coming out. (Reportedly as many as 15,000 a day in the era of self-publishing.) Finding room for just the newest mainstream releases is challenging. You'd need a library the size of a Walmart Supercenter to house a copy of every book that was available these days and even that might not be big enough.

In most cases, the only way you can make room for new books is by getting rid of older books and those that don't get read are the best ones to get rid of. They may be good to great books, but if no one is reading them, then they're wasting space in a library. 

[joannecha]

Touchy subject for me. Used to work part-time in my local (rural) library. We all did inventory, my section being adult fiction. We had to remove any book not checked out in 4 years (this had to be verified on the computer). We are in dire need of larger quarters, but are a poor community where everyone wants things given to them, but we can't get a mileage request to pass (we're working on that). We would put the books removed from the shelves in the sale pile. It was painful to see some of them deleted, but I agree in the sense that there's only so much room. If I were those librarians, I would just check out the books myself (not that I've ever done that). They were wrong in creating false patron records as that is not cool.

[gardenman]

About the only libraries I know of that don't have space issues are the ones at the Jersey shore towns. Those towns have so much tax revenue coming in and so few year round residents, that they've been able to build massive libraries with the tax revenue. (To say nothing of big police forces, fire departments, and more. They literally have more money than they can spend.) Housing prices at the Jersey Shore have gone way up and that's brought a tax windfall to those communities. With few year round residents there's not a lot to spend the tax dollars on so big libraries tend ot get built.

Here's a link to a recent magazine article about the spending down at the shore. http://www.phillymag.com/news/2017/01/07/jersey-shore-politics/#