Virginia: Fairfax County Public Library Tossed Thousands of Books in the Trash

UPDATE (9/9/2013) More Coverage of the Story in this infoDOCKET post.
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Another report about weeding gone wrong?
This time we head to Northern Virginia, a few miles from Washington, D.C.
From WTOP Radio:

Thousands of Fairfax County library books have been tossed in a big dumpster. Some of them show their wear, but others appear nearly unopened.
“This doesn’t really happen in Fairfax County,” Providence Supervisor Linda Smyth says. “There must be a misunderstanding, some exaggeration.”
A group of librarians told her as many as 100,000 books were being tossed from the county’s libraries.

Not believing what she was hearing Smyth went to the library where the books were being tossed into dumpsters and that’s precisely what she found.

“It runs the whole gamut of books, and here we are, trying to figure out why we have some perfectly reusable books put in a recycling bin,” she says.

From the Fairfax Times:

Smyth said she took some of the books to Deputy County Executive David Molchany, who oversees the Fairfax County Public Library & Archives. “He told me that he would keep Library Director Sam Clay from throwing away more books until a new policy on discarding books was implemented,” she said.
But Clay says there are already policies in place, and that the books being discarded are those deemed by those policies to be disposed of in that manner.

Read the Complete Article Including More on the FCPL Policy
One question we have is how long has this been going on?

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Libraries, News, Public Libraries