In a recent “Computing Q & A” by David Einstein in the San Francisco Chronicle a reader asked about digitizing OP books for the Kindle. After explaining the possibilities and costs, as an afterthought Einstein asks “I should have asked this up front, but what’s the point of digitizing an older book that you’ve already read? If it has any monetary value, it’s in the book itself, not the words.”
I realize that “Computing Q & A” is in the business section of the Chronicle but where did the money issue fromto? It makes me think of some of the business school types in library management these days. To them library materials lose their worth as they age, and especially as their respective circulation rates decline precipitously.
How many times I have encountered the question from one of our beloved regulars, “About five [or ten or twenty] years ago I checked out this book on some subject – I now have need for that information, but our library no longer lists the title. I know it was not a hugely popular book back then, but why did you get rid of it?”
Sometimes I could make a decent guess, even to the point of remembering exactly why for a given title; but most of the time I had to hedge with reasons like “It could have been stolen -damaged -lost -worn out, etc.” When I would offer ILL, invariably our patron would ask “If other libraries could keep it, why couldn’t you?”
There are some fields of study where the latest is the “bestest.” I have yet to encounter them within a public library setting. Most fields build on their past, and so the older materials are still valid, some even sparking newer developments. Some other fields – I think of philosophy and theology – seem only to have new thinkers who rework the old ideas, sometimes even repeating something that was written centuries ago and claiming it as a new, never-thought-of-before discovery!
All of this is a long way to say that the technology climate is such that older materials need be read and then let go; the business climate is such that older materials have value only if their physical form can be sold for money; and the library climate, especially among our colleagues who worship the New, is such that older materials should be kept only while they continue circulating.
