UPDATE December 3, 2017
Plan to Remove Books at IUP Libraries Prompts Debate, Petition (via The Indiana Gazette)
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Original Post (November 24, 2017)
From The Indiana Gazette:
“Forty-eight percent of the collection has not been checked out in the past 20 years,” said Michelle Fryling, IUP’s [Indiana University of Pennsylvania] executive director of communications and media relations.
That means nearly half of the 486,000 books at Stapleton, Stabley and Orendorff Music libraries in Indiana and regional libraries at Punxsutawney and Northpointe haven’t been taken out since before the 2001 death of library namesake, longtime Council of Trustees president and state Sen. Patrick J. Stapleton Jr.
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Since February of 2015, IUP has planned a “deaccession” process to remove up to 178,082 books.
“It is something all libraries need to do occasionally,” Moreland said Monday. “It is about professional management of the holdings, bringing the collection up to modern standards.”
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Each library has its own way of dealing with what it no longer needs, said Dustin Holland of Better World Books of Mishawaka, Ind., which will handle what IUP takes off its shelves.
“We still see a lot of libraries that throw those books out,” Holland said. “We’d rather keep the book in people’s hands than recycle it.”
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