A thought experiment. You have 100 feet of shelving in a public library and 1,000 feet of books, with more coming every day. What do you, the librarian, do? You pick and choose which books to put on your shelf and use up your precious shelf space. It’s not because you’re a censor or book-hater, but because the laws of physics apply in libraries and two objects cannot occupy the same space.
In libe parlance, the problem is called “weeding.”
I want to talk about a particular twist in the dispute, which can be particularly well seen in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Texas Library Association, and American Library Association. The passage, and the sources it cites, refer to the necessity to remove books on some criteria—this is called “weeding,” and some sources suggest that each year a public library would generally weed out 5% of its stock—and discuss which criteria are proper:
There are various methods for weeding library collections. One is the “CREW” method, which stands for “Continuous Review, Evaluation, and Weeding.” CREW contains six general guidelines under the acronym “MUSTIE”:
Misleading: factually inaccurate
Ugly: beyond mending or rebinding
Superseded by a new edition or by a much better book on the subject
Trivial: of no discernible literary or scientific merit
Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the library’s community
Elsewhere: the material is easily obtainable from another library.When weeding, the goal is “to maintain a collection that is free from outdated, obsolete, shabby, or no longer useful items.”
Content neutral, and not at all involving a consideration of what might be outdated and obsolete with regard to the nature of its content? Not necessarily in practice, but more importantly, not even in theory.
But here’s the twist: As the government defendants earlier briefing makes clear, both The Weeding Handbook (note 26) and A Weeding Manual (note 27) expressly contemplate “removal of books that, in the view of government officials, contain ‘inappropriate’ ideas or viewpoints.” Here are some passages from A Weeding Manual:
For all items, consider the following problem categories and related issues:
Poor Content: … Material that contains biased, racist, or sexist terminology or views …
Juvenile Fiction … Consider discarding older fiction especially when it has not circulated in the past two or three years. Also look for books that contain stereotyping, including stereotypical images and views of people with disabilities and the elderly, or gender and racial biases.
323 (Immigration & Citizenship) … Weed biased or unbalanced and inflammatory items.
330 (Economics) … Weed career guides with gender, racial, or ethnic bias.
390 (Customs, Etiquette & Folklore) … Discard books that lack clear color pictures. Holiday-specific books may only circulate once or twice a year. Discard books that are MUSTIE or that reflect gender, family, ethnic, or racial bias.
398 (Folklore) … Weed based on the quality of the retelling, especially if racial or ethnic bias is present.
709 (Art History) … While information may not become dated, watch for cultural, racial, and gender biases.740 (Drawing & Decorative Arts) … Discard books on crafts that are no longer popular (macramé) or that feature gender bias.
793-796 (Games and Sports) … Watch for gender and racial bias in sports and athletics.
800 (Literature) … Watch for collections that feature gender or nationality bias and outdated interests and sensitivities.
E (Easy Readers/Picture Books) … Weed books that reflect racial and gender bias.
JF (Juvenile Fiction) … Evaluate closely for outdated styles, artwork, and mores, or biased viewpoints.
These recommendations, of course, reflect the content bias of the writers. It’s likely they would dispute this characterization of bias, as the removal of what they deem as “outdated” and “obsolete” is a matter of fact in their minds, an uncontroversial reality that no reasonable person can deny.
[Quoting one librarian favorably:] “Removing the Dr. Seuss books that are purposefully no longer published due to their racist content is absolutely acceptable because it’s an act of basic collection maintenance. It is our professional duty to make those carefully chosen decisions to ensure our collections are up-to-date and suitable for the communities we serve…. Librarians who claim to be antiracist need to remove these books….”
After all, what sort of horrible librarian would choose racist books to fill precious shelf space when conducting the necessary practice of weeding? In his consideration of the conflict between content neutral weeding and ideological weeding, Eugene Volokh notes the dilemma but reaches no conclusion.
But I think it’s hard to say, as the ALA Brief does, that there’s a “crystal-clear” “[p]rofessional librarian practice” of viewpoint neutrality. Rather, it appears that there is a pretty major split among librarians and among those who discuss library weeding policy: Some view the weeding of certain views as legitimate and indeed recommend such weeding, while others insist on viewpoint-neutral criteria.
Who is right and who is wrong is a complicated question. But the debate shouldn’t be seen, I think, as being between some solid professional norm of viewpoint-neutrality and conservative political departures from such a norm.
It’s unclear to me why Eugene characterizes viewpoint weeding as a “conservative political departure,” although there is no reason why a conservative librarian can’t weed out books which offend his sensibilities. But the problem he raises is a legit problem: Some content is just so archaic in language or content as to be unworthy of that precious shelf space. But who decides and how? Remember, there’s only 100 feet of shelf space and it doesn’t get any bigger no matter how much you wish it did. Something’s gotta give.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I fully understand the need for culling. Hell, I’m in the process of getting rid of – mostly by donating to my local public library for its never-ending book sale – somewhere close to 1,000 books because we’re downsizing and just won’t have room. The decisions that I’m making book-by-book are heartbreaking, but necessary. But the choices are personal, and probably eccentric. (How many copies of the complete poetry of Edmund Spenser do I need? Which editions? What about a friend’s book on police misconduct or a book with a personalized inscription from the author who I got to know as her chauffeur when she came to town for a few days?)
What’s true for me is true for libraries. After all, many of the books in those never-ending sales are deaccessioned. (They maybe can’t hang onto all those editions of Spenseer’s poetry, either.)
But if my choices are personal, the librarians need to be principled. And those principles ought to be viewpoint neutral.
And when a book isn’t available any more (or wasn’t ever) good libraries can make up for a lot. As an example, I just finished reading and then returned to our local county library a book it had obtained for me from a university library on the other side of the state. Did my local county library ever have it? No idea.
Excuse the rant. I take this stuff seriously.
I did this a few months ago for the same reason, offering anyone on twitter the opportunity to come take my books, many of which had personal inscriptions from old friends who had written them. To my surprise, a young man took me up on my offer and took all my books. I was thrilled that they didn’t end up in some landfill.
Glad you did that and it happened.
For a library though, even if a library wants to give away (or sell for a nominal amount as some libraries do), weeded books, it presumably runs into the problem of, if it gives away or sells books with content that some deem objectionable, then there’s a whole new thing people will object to. In addition to the costs of doing so (having a space for pickup or sale, organizing, etc.) instead of disposal.
Before moving I thinned my book collection by donating them to a local private Christian school that was trying to build their own library. They had some acceptance guidelines (my IT and training books weren’t an issue), which will probably apply to the weeding process when that time comes.
To the point, I’d expect an ideological slant to the acceptance and weeding process in a private institution. In public institutions, that are ostensibly for us all, I’d rather a content neutral approach.
Slightly off topic, IMO Doctor Seuss is the greatest American author ever. Whenever I ever think of voting for a Democrat, I remember I will not be able to buy my future grandchildren some of his books. They will never understand why I say “Parsley, quite sparsely” when I cook. I hope I can figure out how to get samizdat copies.
I donated all my Seuss books to a teacher at my kids’ school. I hope that they wore out before they were purged.
How about this for content neutrality: If you have to weed five percent, then you weed the five percent that was checked out the least. If it’s ten percent, then the ten percent that’s checked out the least, and so on. The problem with that, for libraries, is that only about five percent of the books account for 95 percent of what is checked out. Most books are not checked out for years.
Or maybe you keep only what’s rarely checked out to encourage people to read outside their comfort zone. (I realize that’s a seriously problematic idea, and I don’t actually endorse it.)
one of these days I’ll have to get around to culling the books. or my survivor will. it will be hard; some are quite pretty and maybe good; others not so pretty and maybe better. and — Karl Marx or Algernon Sidney? Mao or Augustine?
as I’ve said, choosing will be hard. but the one thing I’m sure of: whether it’s me, or in its own turn the brooklyn library system as to its own choices, I don’t want the government to do it.
An interesting article as the ALA is talks about banning books constantly and yet librarians are getting rid of enormous numbers of titles just as a practical part of running a library. There is an idea in the banning conversation that getting rid of books for ideological reasons is bad and yet we see ideological reason being applied by some librarians as part of a routine “weeding”.
For even more ideology see some librarians hold forth on using weeding to “decolonize” their collections. Librarians get to “ban” books like the out of print Dr. Seuss books, without getting stuck with the epithet of “censor”.
The trouble is it’s difficult to track all of this and we all have a different ideal for what the perfect library collection should be and each library collection should reflect its community to some degree.
For concerned people, I would suggest advocating for the books you’d like to see included. If your library repeatedly turns down requests for reasonably well known books, there might be an ideological issue on staff.
A partial solution to this challenge would be to negotiate better terms with the digital content providers that libraries license ebooks from (i.e. Libby). While there is a limited cost to storing and distributing books, the selection of digital titles available from my city’s library is limited. These services restrict the number of ‘copies’ of a title that can be checked out at once, but only very popular books and magazines are available.
Perhaps the rights holders feel this limits their earning power too much, but title’s whose content has been superseded still have value. Ideas change, and the old becomes new again. Some titles become valued only after they have long been out of circulation.
Don’t get me started on the mess that is academic publishing..
Build more shelves?