Thanks, but no thanks...

My apologies for the long delay between blog posts everyone.  I've had a few ideas in the back of my head for a while, but haven't been able to get them out by typing...

I'd like to talk about book donations today.

In the past few weeks, we've had four large donations made by patrons, only one of which provided the library with good books that were added to our collection.  The one good donation consisted of a handful of recently published hardcovers and trade paperbacks and nothing else.  The other three donations each had two or three books we considered keeping, but the majority of the books included were exactly the sort of books we're trying to remove from the library -- extensively damaged books, outdated non-fiction, and old books.

I suppose people are reluctant to discard books and assume that they can always be put to good use in the library.  But that's not how it works.

First, non-fiction becomes outdated extremely quickly.  Books about current events are often obsolete less than a year after publication, and even books written about long-past events such as World War I lose their relevance as new information is uncovered and our morals and beliefs evolve.  Don't believe me?  Try looking at old books about the early days of British Columbia.  I'll bet that most of those books, even those that were highly regarded at the time of their publication, use a number of offensive racial slurs to describe Chinese immigrants.

Second, fiction also becomes dated.  True, there are books that defy the odds and eventually become timeless classics while some others become interesting historical artifacts that reveal the zeitgeist of the publication year to readers.  She'll never get off the ground by Robert J. Serling, a novel about the training and career of an airline's first female pilot, is an example of the latter.  However, the majority of fiction simply becomes old.  How many library patrons really want to read a story about a child whose friends are jealous because he has a brand new Commodore 64?

Third, we don't need any more old books because we've already got enough of them in our collection that we're trying to get rid of.  Our collection still has a *lot* of books from the 1970s and 1980s in spite of our efforts at weeding.  Last year we weeded over 1000 books from the adult fiction section that hadn't been borrowed in at least 2 1/2 years and were published earlier than 1998.  This summer we weeded the adult paperback section in a similar manner and removed books that hadn't been borrowed in at least 3 years and were similarly old.

Finally, despite what people think, libraries do not have a special way to dispose of old books.  We place books on our sale cart and recycle them after they've been there for a few months.

I suppose what this rambling post comes down to is this request:

Please folks, don't drop off your unwanted books at the library unless they are in good condition and published within the last five years.  If you're donating anything else, you're really just passing off the burden of disposal to library staff members.