Jack Waterford http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/by/Jack-Waterford Editor-at-large, The Canberra Times In Australia alone, libraries are getting rid of at least 5 million books a year. The library of lost books would be of considerable size, bigger, probably than the shelves in my house could bear. But not by much. Its successor, 200 years from now, will be many times greater. Thousands of books of classical Greece and Rome, and of other civilisations, did not survive the Dark Ages, and are known only in fragments or from references made in other books which did survive. Even in more recent centuries, hundreds of books, pamphlets, and musical scores seem to have been lost forever. The Library of Alexandria was the greatest repository of knowledge in the classical world about 2300 years ago. It is believed to have contained about 40,000 books in perhaps 600,000 rolls of papyrus - and was focused not only on consciously collecting and storing ''all the world's knowledge'' but on having, in effect, the master copy of all texts. Scholars came from all over Africa and the Mediterranean to transcribe, or to compare their transcribed versions with something as close as possible to the original. It no longer exists, alas, although the scholars are never quite sure whether they should blame Julius Caesar, the Emperor Aurelian, anti-pagan iconoclasm or even, if more doubtfully, conquering Arab Muslims. Advertisement These days, alas, we are burning and burying far more books than ever did an invading, ignorant horde of Christians, Muslims or Nazis. Our chief book burners are our librarians. In Australia alone, librarians in our major libraries and cultural institutions, including state and university libraries, are probably ''deaccessioning'' at least 5 million books a year - say half the number of books in the National Library of Australia. A single shelf containing these would stretch from Canberra to Newcastle - or have given every school that built a library during Gillard's Building the Education Revolution, about 35 metres of books each. The professional ''deaccessioning'' is probably less than a quarter of what is being disposed of by lending library systems, forced not only to renew worn stock but also continually to find space for new works by culling older ones that are no longer so popular, so relevant, or useful. The dead books are not going to book fairs, being sold to the used book trade, or even made available, very cheaply, to patrons of the libraries. Culling programs are rarely announced in advance. Getting rid of books is invariably controversial and unpopular, even when libraries believe it to be necessary. Most of the culling is done secretly, and most of the books go to landfill, with active security to prevent any rescue. Some consciences think of the information needs of others, including the poor or the developing world, but because books in bulk are heavy and expensive to transport, it is easier to send a donation of the freight cost. Librarians in charge of this carnage are not barbarians. They are pushed into systemic regular destruction by declining budgets, declining space, and the declining need to have physical copies of books scattered around. There's the internet, the e-book, and hundreds of scholarly serials are now fairly readily accessible, even if, sometimes, for a fee. Librarians are less the physical custodians of musty tomes than guides into where and how one can find information on a topic. In many cases, moreover, many volumes on the shelves of the great institutions are never, or hardly ever consulted, and a considerable proportion are, at best, only of historic interest, since the knowledge they purvey has long been superseded, as often as not, in new, heavily revised, fresh editions of the same basic text. Yet it's a horrible process and, in my view, likely to be done badly, even by people who love learning, love books, or who understand, as many people impatient to see an end of paper do not, that the very touch, sight, smell and presentation of a book is something more than a mere collection, as digits, of the images it contains. Internet access to books and information is a fabulous thing - an adjunct even for someone such as myself who relishes and appreciates the difference between the book and its contents. But there are serious risks in thinking that one can completely replace the other - or that, in some matter, digitised information, stored today, will be instantly accessible forever. Here are some evidences of the problem. A bookseller told me recently of discussing a focused library, essentially on economic geography, built up lovingly over the years by an academic who had retired, then died. His wife wanted a good (free) home for the books - preferably as a collection, alternatively, via the second-hand book trade to people who recognised their real worth. Many of the books were rare but not particularly valuable. What gave the library value was as a collection, a repository of specialised knowledge, even, to a degree, a feedback on the memory, the tools and the experience of this man and his generation. The owner had tried to donate it, first to his old academic department - but it, as so often these days, was now so reorganised, captured by new academic fads, and in a phase of prostituting half of the discipline in a quest to be relevant to a new generation of students, that it had no space, no place and no need for it. The institution's own library was throwing out hundreds of thousands of books. The bookseller had no warehouse and had a need for reasonably quick turnover; reluctantly he refused them even as a gift. A late ANU academic of world standing in his disciplines gave away a considerable library before he died. But he kept at home an incomparable set of collections in language: English, Icelandic, Old and Middle English, and 19th-century literature. Bits and pieces have been picked over - even by Oxford, the National Library and the ANU library - but most of the collections will have to be broken up. There are no English faculties capable of appreciating them: today's faculties of critical studies, cultural studies, communications and other academies of postmodern tosh are not actually ''into'' literature, or criticism, or culture, or communications. Meanwhile, I am told, James Cook University at Townsville is about to junk what I am told is a fabulous collection on marine science, and Pacific travel, exploration and culture because there is not much call for them. In my mind's eye, I see an old salt mine - or perhaps the limitless warehouse from *Raiders of the Lost Ark*- where discarded books could be sent, by institutions and others who have loved knowledge. Inside, gnarled folk - perhaps retired - would sort them into sets: ■ Books such as modern novels, cookbooks and mental or business self-help tomes that can be sold as roof insultation, by the cubic metre. ■ Those, including nearly all paperbacks, that could be sent to Lifeline, to be appreciated, all over again, by the discerning masses. ■ Books whose novelty or antiquarian value exceeded their academic value that could be sold from an adjacent shop. ■ Those that could be a Library of Alexandria in waiting - or perhaps, the standing basis for a Library at the University of Goodooga, or Goulburn, when the nation progressed to such a peak of civilisation. Such a venture, I venture, could do more good for learning than 10,000 school libraries of the modern sort (i.e., with computers but not books), or town libraries specialising, as many now are, in holdings of DVDs. -- Warm regards. Jayadev P Hiremath Independent Libraries Professional (Former Librarian - IBS,Kuwait) E-mail : jayadevh@hotmail.com LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jayadev-p-hiremath/44/12a/2a0 Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/people/Jayadev-P-Hiremath/603802230 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.