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A delicate balancing act

Posted on | December 9, 2009 | 1,907 views |

By Adam King

Two books, similar in every way, sit side by side on the shelf. Both are in good condition, poised to be read for decades to come.

Only one, however, may stay. The other must take a journey — one that helps the Ohio State Libraries to maintain the delicate balance between budget and space.
With tens of thousands of new printed materials coming in every year to support the university’s teaching and research missions, the libraries’ already over-maximized storage capacity must be culled to make room.

That makes duplicate books an easy choice for removal. So too are books whose physical condition is so poor that they are unable to be preserved. And if certain books have a valid electronic or digital form that can equally support future curricula or research, those can be considered as well.

But where do the books go once they leave the shelf?

In a perfect world, they would be shipped to anyone who wanted them. African universities are constantly asking OSU Libraries for materials, but those universities can’t afford the shipping costs and OSU doesn’t have a budget for that.

So items nobody wants — 80,000 volumes of Chemical Abstracts taking up 4,000 shelves, for example — and those in useless condition are pulped and recycled.

The Friends of the OSU Libraries (FOSUL) takes care of the rest, including books donated to the libraries from people inside and outside the university that don’t make it into the collection. Through a contract with Better World Books, a US-based for-profit advocacy group that works for world literacy, OSU’s volumes are marketed on 17 Web sites such as Amazon.com in the hopes of giving the reading material a second life.

It’s been a successful venture thus far because even with the rise of electronic formats and e-readers, paper books are still highly in demand.

“Books are the most convenient way to communicate certain ideas and most pleasurable way to read certain ideas,” said Jim Bracken, OSU Libraries’ assistant director of collections, instruction and public services. “I can’t imagine reading from a computer screen a love poem to my girlfriend, who is now my wife. When we do sell things, we get a slice of the money back and it goes back to our budget and lets us buy things we didn’t have.”

FOSUL used to hold twice annual book sales at Thompson Memorial Library, which netted between $15,000 and $18,000 annually. Through Better World Books’ improved marketing, Ohio State’s 15 percent cut has amounted to about $20,000 a year over the past four years, and this year is on track for $30,000. That money goes directly to the libraries for special events, collections or projects. In fact, FOSUL donated $250,000 to the library’s recent renovation.

Another 5 percent of the proceeds goes toward one of five nonprofit literacy programs offered by Better World Books; OSU Libraries has chosen Books for Africa. Through that program, more than 20 million books have been shipped to children around the continent since 1988.

Overall, Better World Books has raised more than $7.4 million to support literacy programs and saved more than 30 million books from the landfill. Any book it can’t sell within 12-18 months is recycled.

“Nobody wants to throw books out,” said Larry Allen, OSU Libraries communications director. “And Better World Books has the resources to do things better than we could ever do. This also was an opportunity to support initiatives on a global scale as the university tries to reposition itself and extend our reach a little bit.”

The Thompson Library holds approximately 1.25 million books and OSU Libraries’ book depository on Kinnear Road holds another 3 million. The remainder of the 6.4 million-book collection is housed at libraries across campus, such as music, fine arts and science and engineering. Taking on more without thinning the current stock would break the libraries’ budget and create space issues.

Allen said OSU Libraries is always working to solve these problems, from getting recommendations from a faculty/student government advisory group (the Council on Library and Information Technology) to conducting a statewide study (still unfinished) to see if sharing tomes with the other book depositories in Ohio might be an answer.

Ohio State also is part of the Google Book Project, which aims to scan and have available millions of books online, and that could become another key component of solving the space issue.

“It’s still an important means of research to have the actual book, but it depends on the discipline,” Allen said. “Chemistry and engineering tend to want things electronically. English, history and philosophy often prefer the print collections. Each discipline has their preferred way of accessing information and we want to be able to respect that as best we can.”

Priced to sell

Better World Books currently has almost 30,000 books provided by Friends of the OSU Libraries to sell, and of those the cheapest are used paperbacks that start at $3.98.

The first book to pop up in a search by price at betterworldbooks.com is Judy Blume’s Freckle Juice. The most popular book is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Rudolf Steiner at $6.98.

And the most expensive tome? That goes to the 1986 hardcover version of Mathematics in Economics: Models and Methods by London School of Economics lecturer Adam Ostaszweski, which can be had for $6,838.48.

Patrons who wish to support OSU books, of which 15 percent of each sale is returned to OSU Libraries, can type their Columbus-area zip code into the “Sidewalk Sale” search engine at betterworldbooks.com and click on the Ohio State link.

More than 1,400 public and academic libraries have contracts with Better World Books.

The Friends of the OSU Libraries will take gently used book donations at 619 Ackerman Library or call 292-3387 to schedule a book pickup in the Columbus area (journals, magazines and Reader’s Digest are not accepted).

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