New Zealand's Culling of Foreign Books

Almost a year ago, National Library of New Zealand started culling up to 600,000 books that originated outside the country. Some of the books on the list are rare editions of popular works. Most have not (or were not prior to removal) been digitized. The library is working with other libraries and with community groups to determine which books will be rehomed, but there are concerns within the country and internationally that books of significance will become indefinitely unavailable to the public or be lost entirely.

This first culling of "overseas"--also referred to as "foreign"--material is expected to continue until mid-2021. Some of the lists of impacted book titles are provided on the library's website.

References

News: 'I literally weep': anguish as New Zealand's National Library culls 600,000 books (The Guardian)

News: National Library in middle of first major cull of international books (NZ Herald)

Project site: Overseas published collections — collection management project

(this post now links to the LT Local page for the library)

Expressions of interest are no longer accepted for the following overseas books lists.

==
Computer science, information and general-works
Duplicates in the overseas published collections
Fiction titles
Philosophy and psychology
Religion
Social science
Computer science, information and general-works (Whanganui store)
Language (Whanganui store)
Philosophy and psychology (Whanganui store)
Religion (Whanganui store)
Science (Whanganui store)
Social science (Whanganui store)
===

The New Zealand library is accepting expressions of interest for the following non-fiction collections (all from the Whanganui store) until 12 October 2020.

==
Arts and recreation
History and geography
Literature
Technology
Unclassified non-fiction
===

Not to be contrarian, but, 1) it does make sense. The National Library of (whichever country) really really is supposed to be primarily for those books written by the citizens of that country, and then other countries books if there are room. There are countries that have room, like the US, like GB, etc. Most don't.

2) C'mon, are people seriously thinking that, what, librarians are going to start simply throwing out books, or that they won't try to give them to the country's library where the author is from? These are librarians not capitalists. Librarians. I've seen public librarians fight to keep a POS looking book that had 1 person in 5 years take it out because of that one person (thankfully we got rid of it, that's called non-circulation and it needs to be weeded, now, this is more complicated than that, but, it's the same idea)

3) You're telling me that New Zealand has the, what, only copies of some of these books? Really? Honestly, probably not. No offense to New Zealand, really liked the two professors I had from there in undergrad, and your famous people seem pretty cool too.

But, this seems like very much using inflammatory words in headlines (cull, seriously, cull??) that aren't needed to flame the fire of a nothing-burger story. (I'm a little surprised by the Guardian's choice of headlines, maybe it was an editorial).

Oh, and from the article, to me, it sounds like what they're doing is getting rid of old white men other places in the world tomes for novels and stories by the native people of New Zealand? I think that's a really good idea.

It's along the same lines when some news outlet that needs clicks pretends to give a crap that some poor public library that has no more space is 'getting rid of' thousands of books. Never saying that most of those books look like they've been through a Rugby match, or that they haven't gone out in 3, 5, 10 years, or that their information is so darn out of date that it could be harmful.

>3 DanieXJ:

1. I agree the cleanup makes sense and was past due. The speed and timing of it is a problem for book preservation. The project progressed for a year before it attracted widespread attention.

2. Yes, librarians have been known to throw out thousands of books-- in the trash-- despite public outcry or what other librarians want. That's why New Zealand's silence on what happened to unclaimed books (hundreds of thousands?!) is deeply concerning. Especially with...

3. Yes, the people digging through the book lists that National Library provided says the only known copies of certain books were preserved in New Zealand. The authors of these books weren't all "old white men" or people with no ties to the country.

Perhaps read the entire article?

Either way, you can choose to not give a shit while I continue reaching out to libraries in my country who might be able to take some of the books on this month's lists.

>3 DanieXJ: another note, because it's strange what you said in a group for librarians. Culling is a common library term for the selection process for removing books. In this case, I would like it to sting a little. More people could be helping to rehome collections.

>3 DanieXJ: "The National Library of (whichever country) really really is supposed to be primarily for those books written by the citizens of that country, and then other countries books if there are room. There are countries that have room, like the US, like GB, etc. Most don't."

I'm not too sure. My own local national library (Wales, part of GB) states "part of our mission (is) to bring the world to Wales and Wales to the world". I'd be surprised if other national libraries don't include something similar in their mission statements.

>5 aspirit: Not in the Northeast US as far as I know (and I've been doing this a longgg time in a bunch of different libraries). We in the public library space tend to refer to it as Weeding over here at least.

>7 DanieXJ: thank you for the note on terminology in your area.

Has your current library been looking at New Zealand's book lists?

I'm unsure why we would?

Where I am currently, we're not any sort of academic or preservation type library. We're a public library to about 47,000 residents in our city (plus a bunch of the residents of the two cities next to us who have... not as much city government support. Seamless reciprocal borrowing in a consortium setting is a beautiful thing) with barely enough room for our own books, media, computers, study space, program space, etc.

Not to mention, our staff is nowhere near big enough to even have enough time to start looking through the catalog on the off chance that someone recognizes something or someone on the list.

Sorry. We're just barely holding on during this pandemic, and trying to keep everything in our library sphere moving forward and not sliding backwards (the masks below the nose is honestly our current fight, not to mention those who just simply do not want to wear one, and yet they must. Period.) And hoping and sometimes literally praying that our city and the cities between us don't have such a big resurgence that we have to close again, therefore cutting off all computer usage to the patrons who need it most... again, as we had to do in March-June or so. Unfortunately, a book drama on the other side of the world is very low on our radar, no matter if it does indeed matter.

>9 DanieXJ: understandable.