A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place.

I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.

> the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books

Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.

I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing.

Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.

But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.

I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.

Sensationalism. That's routine collection management.

Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...

At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.

People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that

Modern public libraries primarily serve other purposes than paper book lending. University libraries don’t face that constraint but with the Library of Congress and Google we have a safe copy for surviving civilizations. So the only question now is how one accesses the content.

I’ve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself.

Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not, perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.

I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them.

My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/

As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child.

OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same".

Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...

It would be nice if there was a rule allowing unwanted books to be destructively scanned and put online in the public domain.

Maybe publishers could have the right to purchase the books back at current list price or something if they want to block the shredding.

On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you expect to happen? Faculty often don’t have any idea how the systems that support them actually function, but things have to actually be made to work.

Berkeley has the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond, CA for this very purpose. I’ve checked out books where they crackled as I opened them and it was clear I was the first to read them.

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf

What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.

> since a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals.

Gotta love how as hundreds of billions of tax dollars are being misappropriated through corruption, state university books about to be trashed can't be taken home supposedly to prevent corruption. Nothing wrong with throwing away books, but let common sense prevail and people take them home.

Down with the oligarchy.

Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me.

As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.

Honestly, I think part of the problem is that around the time librarians rebranded themselves as 'information scientists' they got a bit carried away about how special they were and fell in love with the power of administration - so much more exciting than merely curating books selected by other people.

Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books. It’s one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism manifests.

vaguely reminds me of the library massacre at New College

* https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/d4018abd-6789-46ea-83bc-092fddc313...

* https://abcnews.com/US/books-dumped-en-masse-floridas-new-co...

Don’t worry everyone, the Ministry of Truth will make sure we know what we need to know.

A given library system should have a "last copy" policy, and should keep at least one copy of each book which has been added to their collection --- any which can't afford that need more funding.

>Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert

When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its contents.

Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul.

>A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect) --- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton

c.f.,

>No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet Beecher Stowe