The Washington Post notes that the Fairfax libraries are purging their collections to save on space:

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, “The Great Gatsby” and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

Later in the article,

To do more with less, Fairfax library officials have started running like businesses. Clay bought state-of-the art software that spits out data on each of the 3.1 million books in the county system — including age, number of times checked out and when. There are also statistics on the percentages of shelf space taken up by mysteries, biographies and kids’ books.

A few observations of my own:

1. It’s about time libraries started running themselves like a business. In many ways, they’re actually (sadly) one of the first government agencies to do so. Libraries face direct competition on a number of fronts, from coffee houses, book stores, the internet, and other cultural institutions. They need to adapt to stay relevant, and in doing so, they need to adopt the management practices that have made their competitors so effective. On the flipside, libraries also need to get over themselves and realize that, with all this competition, they can’t continue to see themselves the same way they did fifteen or twenty years ago.
2. The computer system only uses circulation data, but the best use I get out of a library is when I go there for breadth, rather than depth, and don’t check books out. Instead, I’ll pull a number of relevant books off the shelf and read a chapter or so of each, often because it’s all I need or all that’s relevant. I use the library as a reference service, not a lending service (in part because I’m not capable of returning anything on time). A more accurate measure of reference use would be how often a book is reshelved, and even that metric is flawed – was the book reshelved because people found it useful but didn’t need to check it out, or because they took it off the shelf and then weren’t interested? Gathering the metric with the computer system wouldn’t be difficult – add a reshelf table to the database, and before books are reshelved, scan the whole cart. I also imagine this would work better for non-fiction than fiction.
3. As the article points out, libraries aren’t nearly as much about books anymore. Fiction is exceptionally cheap relative to incomes, to the point where owning books is much easier and much more common. Books also take a long time to bring to market, so for many subjects, they can’t stay timely and accurate very long. I remember going to the library when I was little and finding two decade old current events books, or books about computers from the 60’s. At some point, these just take up space. Most of my friends who consistently use the library see it as a cheaper form of Blockbuster (but with harsher late fees). Others use it as a meeting place. The only people I know who depend on it for books are my grandparents, and even they’re starting to buy more.

Categories: Books, Business and Economics, Community, Distribution, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, Metrics, Strategy
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