If I ever have so much grappa that I start singing “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” while getting railed in a '95 Ford Explorer, put me out of my misery.
That would even get crowded in an SUV.
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I’ve been trying to find a great article I read a few years ago — maybe in the New Yorker? — about a New York(?) public library that was determined to weed out it collection, culling it to a fraction of its size, and the secret team of librarians that did everything they could to stop the process, from deliberately misfiling books to, as a last resort, storing boxes full of books in their homes until the process ended.
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If I ever have so much grappa that I start singing “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” while getting railed in a '95 Ford Explorer, put me out of my misery.
Amen.
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We were the opposite, we wanted rid of stuff so bad because we were so incredibly over crowded. I don’t work there anymore but they FINALLY built a new building where the collection actually fits.
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Perhaps this old Nicholson Baker article The Author v the Library
The trouble with old collections is that maintaining them at a consistent level is very expensive. For instance, the University of New Brunswick St John deaccessioned the bulk of its once great Science Fiction collection because maintaining it at its current level was horribly expensive, for a small university (2000 students)
Large gaps existed in the collection in terms of chronological repre- sentation as well. While one of the collection’s strength lies in its historical coverage, containing works from eras considered foundational to the genre onward, later periods suffered from neglect; subgenres were often neglected as well; their coverage was spotty at best. For example, the collection had, by publication year, 546 titles published in 1975, 373 titles in 1985, 243 titles in 1995, and 11 titles in 2005. Cutbacks to the budget and, beginning around 2000, the absence of a librarian designated as responsible for the collection further compounded these imbalances. While some earlier works and eras are well represented, contemporary SFF is poorly represented, and widely known subgenres such as cyberpunk and urban fantasy are almost nonexis- tent. There were 9 William Gibson works, 16 by Rudy Rucker, and 6 circu- lating titles by Bruce Sterling to represent cyberpunk authors, while urban fantasy–representative works include de Lint’s 10, Matt Ruff’s 1, and Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm’s 8 circulating titles. In part, these collection pat- terns reflected collection use for course work at UNBSJ. Well-developed areas include utopian, Arthurian, and apocalyptic fiction, as each of these themes appeared semiregularly in courses taught on campus. Currently, however, only one undergraduate course relies on the SFF collection to any significant extent: “Topics in Speculative Fiction,” taught every other winter session.
Nikkel, T., & Belway, L. (2009). When Worlds Collide: Dismantling the Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John. Collection Management, 34(3), 194–208. doi:10.1080/01462670902963288
This week I received a email from a largish metropolitan library confirming that they don’t have the rare and obscure book I was searching for, and redirecting me to my own contributions at the internet archive!
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Wow, that was precisely it. No wonder I couldn’t find it. What was I doing reading an article from 1996? And a paper one too, since it’s hard-paywalled online?
Nice memory/nice work.
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