Weeding

It's occurring to me now that people who love books really shouldn't try to do certain library tasks. I discovered back in Library School that I probably couldn't be a cataloguer. I remember that day when a professor handed each of us aspiring cataloguers a stack of books to practice our subject-heading skills on. At the end of the class, very few subject headings had been applied to my books, and I was sitting there reading.

Or, take weeding, the process of selecting books for deselection, as we euphemistically call it. I'm currently going through some antiquated technology books, and I can't help but pity the poor things, even or perhaps especially the ones that have sat unused for over 20 years. It brings me back to those laws of library science we learned, every reader his or her book, every book its reader. And no matter how dated or seemingly useless the book I'm considering, I find myself picturing the reader that this one would be exactly right for.

Take the dated programming guides to defunct languages. (Take them off my mind, if you would.) Someone maintaining legacy software, or a historian of the evolution of programming, might find them invaluable. Software manual? A hobbyist, or someone trying to decode an old file. And many of the old texts have insights still as relevant as Ranganathan's are, if only the ones who need them would look...

But I'm afraid they wouldn't, and won't be able to in any case.