Today in the conservation lab…I’m evaluating books from our circulating collection, to determine if we should have them withdrawn or order replacements. These are books that, for some reason, cannot be easily or efficiently repaired. Many of them are brittle, but others are missing many of their pages due to vandalism, or cannot be rebound again by our bindery because they don’t have enough gutter margin left.

The process makes me feel a bit like this:

In order to make my choice of who lives (gets replaced) and who dies (gets withdrawn), I consider several factors: number of circulations, other copies/editions in our library holdings, if it’s been digitized and is available through repositories like HathiTrust or the Internet Archive, how easy it is to find a replacement copy for purchase, etc.