This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The modern librarian loathes nothing more than books. They take up space. They get dirty. They might be read, which is annoying. Or they might not be read, which is pointless. Everything about them is an awkward hangover of a different millennium.
Yes, the printing press had a good five centuries. But the digital age outstrips it in every way: students can read without leaving their beds; publishers can charge for access without making any physical product; academics can search through databases with AI tools to give the veneer of deep and careful research and librarians can return to their true love — space and order.
So how to deal with the legacy of physical books in academic libraries? There have been three waves of “weeding” in recent decades. First, librarians sought out books that had not been borrowed much, or at all, assuming that this was surefire evidence of their unimportance.
Whilst some works were indeed “outdated” relative to their academic discipline, the cull inevitably laid waste to countless books used only for reference or owned by the library because of their intrinsic rarity.
The other two waves are much worse — and are deliberately carried out with minimal consultation and sharing of information to disguise their barbarism.
Strategy Two was to look into which books and journals were available digitally. If they were online, either behind subscription paywalls or freely available, they were fair game for removal, often into a skip. Never mind that this means you can’t read these works except at a screen and with a reliable power source and internet connection.
Never mind that financial straits have seen many institutions cancel subscriptions to the digital resources they destroyed in their free physical form or that thousands of titles once freely available have since been removed from Google Books and Internet Archive.
Strategy Three is a scorched-earth policy that ramped up during Covid: the wholesale clearance of shelves by subject. Sometimes the libraries are paid a token sum by one of the big national purchasers (chief amongst them Anybook in Lincoln); often they give them up freely, clearance being sufficient payment for the space-craving librarian, dreaming of the open-plan study-hub possibilities.
Hundreds of thousands of books have thus entered the market from British universities in the last decade. These include huge collections from Durham, Bristol, Reading, Birkbeck, Royal Holloway, Lancaster, Kent, Bangor and Hull (poor Larkin) and from colleges at Cambridge (Caius, Christ’s, Jesus, Newnham, Pembroke, Queens’) and Oxford (Exeter, St Hilda’s, Somerville, Trinity).
It is no sacrilege for a book to be deaccessioned from a library. But the sheer scale and speed of culling mean that no-one has the time, knowledge or interest to appraise each book.
Rare titles are unwittingly cast away; worse still, books carefully annotated by great academics of that institution are unthinkingly turfed out; yet worse still, precious books left in bequest to an institution that would care for them indefinitely are ruthlessly scattered to the wind. And for what? All are too ashamed even to make the case.
If this is how stupidly universities treat the books on which they are built, good riddance to them, too.
