Mark Crookston: The National Library to dispose of half a million books

The National Library wants to destroy half a million unwanted books from its collection. 

The library says most of the titles have not been issues for the last 20 to 30 years, and attempts to donate books in the past only resulted in modest pick up.

Mark Crookston is the Director of Content Services at the National Library. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The National Library wants to destroy half a million unwanted
books from its collection. The libraries is most of the
titles have not been issued for the last twenty to
thirty years, and attempts to donate the books in the
past have only resulted in modest pickup. Mark Crookston is
the director of Content Services at the National Library with
us Now, how.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Mark, hello, Heather, how are you very well?

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Thank you? What kind of books are we talking about?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
The books are predominantly nonfiction, over ninety percent of them
in non section. Most of them were published in the
middle of last century, so from about the nineteen thirties
about the nineteen eighties, and they were either inherited by
the National Library when the National Library came about in
nineteen sixty five, or collected soon after that for the

(00:46):
purposes of supporting people wanting to borrow them who couldn't
get them from their own library, their own public library.
So the National Library provides a lending service to other
libraries to support via communities.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
What kind of books are we talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
So the nonfection predominantly that covers the whole range of
subjects across the Jewy decimal classification. So a couple that
caught my eye that when I've walked through there got
thousands of travel guides and travel compendiums, for example.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
The people are redundant.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
That's right. Well, people get their travel information from sources
that are not from mid twentieth century travel guides or
travel stories. Things like. There's a lot of technical information
in there, a lot of sort of technical mathematics books,
technical DIY books for people who are wanting to do

(01:44):
DIY related.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Which is also redundant, isn't it because of videos?

Speaker 2 (01:48):
All right? That's right. You can get your sources from
a range of different places now rather than a mid century.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Some of the books, though, are not as crappy as that,
because apparently the owner of how to Find Books reckons
that some of these books would retail for three hundred
to five hundred dollars. He's cited the example of a
two volume set bibliography of UFO books from the nineteen fifties.
Have you tried to sell the books?

Speaker 2 (02:14):
We did not consider sale as one of the options.
We have a policy on removal and disposal and that's
available on the National Library.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
Does your policy exclude trying to sell the books?

Speaker 2 (02:26):
No, it doesn't. It says that in terms of considerations,
it considers transfer, donation, sale destruction. So we undertook the
transfer option. We had our own experts go through the
collection and we selected about thirty thousand items to come
into another part of the National Library's collection that we
held other libraries. We made the list available to other

(02:50):
libraries and they selected about fifteen thousand. We donated some
to charities a few years ago for sale revenue generation
for them that proved to be largely unsuccessful and largely
reinforced what what. What we thought about this is that
there's not that much demand for these books, okay, and

(03:12):
we considered sale, but it's quite an expensive undertaking and.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Because of the man hours that it would take to
sort of take the books, take the books out to
the curb, put them on some trolleys, label them with
one dollar each.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to think that, you know,
it's quite a simple process, but its intensive. It is.
It's very labor intensive. It's to the tune of several
hundreds of thousands of dollars that we didn't think was
good use of taxpayers money for items that are not
New Zealand or Pacific items, which is what our concentration
and our purpose is in the National Library of New Zealand.

(03:49):
They're not They're from a lending collection that's not being
l they're not wanted, and spending several hundred thousand dollars
in order to prepare them for sale. We didn't think
was particular. Listen, what are you doing?

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Do you just shove them through a shredder?

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Well, we don't do that specifically. These commercial operations in
New Zealand that have documented document destruction services, Hey brilliant.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Thank you so much, Mark, I really appreciate you on this.
Mark Crookston, Director of Content Services the National Library.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
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