To Trash a ‘Mockingbird’

An article in The Washington Post highlights a trend that, to campus librarians and bibliophiles of all types, must seem like a sign of the apocalypse: Public libraries are tossing out influential books just because they haven't been checked out in quite a while.

Armed with a new computer program that identifies volumes that haven't been touched for 24 months, the public libraries of Fairfax County, Va., have pulled from their shelves such titles as The Aeneid, Candide, and (rather astonishingly, given its popularity) To Kill a Mockingbird. (For the time being, To Kill a Mockingbird has escaped the chopping block: In a few special cases, librarians override the software's decrees.)

At many libraries, the weeding-out process takes place in part to make room for audiobooks, DVD's, and computers. But Voltaire and Harper Lee are also being asked to step aside so Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele can get top billing. "Like Borders and Barnes & Noble," the Post writes, "Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system's return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves — and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz."

If you think such brazen talk of demographics is unseemly, you're not alone. "The Great Weed is entirely unacceptable," writes David Rothman at TeleRead. "We’re talking about libaries, not Barnes & Noble." A streamlined, purely demand-driven library is a lousy place to go and browse, Mr. Rothman notes: "Doesn’t Fairfax care about serendipity?"

The push to add more high-tech material may have helped get libraries into this mess, but it may also help them wriggle back out. Mr. Rothman suggests that librarians promote access to online collections of public-domain material. To that end, he urges them to fight the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. –Brock Read