TWEETS ABOUT THE ‘dumping’ of thousands of books and journals by a university library caused a bitter row at UCD with librarians feeling “dismay and upset” after being tied to throwing out valuable reading material.
The row began when an academic at UCD tweeted last year to say “hundreds if not thousands of books and journals [were] being thrown into a bin lorry” at the college.
However, in internal emails, library staff said only a small amount of books – none of them particularly old – were being discarded with.
And they said that old journal editions, which were also being gotten rid of, had no resale value and that nobody would want to take them.
One email said: “You can’t have it both ways. We can’t retain dusty, untouched stock, and provide the very services and spaces [the staff member is] passionate about. Something’s got to give, unpleasant though it may seem to him.”
The senior member of library staff also took issues with remarks about the removal of microfiche readers from the UCD library for reading old newspapers and other material.
He said that use of the readers had become so infrequent that some newer library staff were actually unsure on how to use the system.
An email said: “Twenty years is a long time in technology. Twenty years ago, DVDs were still seen as a ‘new’ format. As someone who used to work in client services, I can tell you that the existing, remaining [microfiche] machine was very rarely used.”
In other correspondence, principal archivist Kate Manning said the “outrage machine [had been] working in full capacity on social media”.
She wrote: “It comes across like librarians and archivists don’t understand the value of what we look after, not as an argument about the prioritisation of other campus buildings over the development of the library.”
Ms Manning said UCD library staff had completely transformed the way they worked during the Covid-19 pandemic to facilitate digital access for staff.
“This was done in people’s attics, on laptops, while trying to get their heads around working from home and being caught in a global pandemic,” she wrote.
She said digitisation had not been chosen over paper formats “for fun” and that it was a constant balance between money, staff, time, and space in enabling access.
Ms Manning said some of the Twitter responses had portrayed UCD library staff as “philistines” and that it was “extremely disheartening”.
A librarian from another institution emailed to lend their support saying they could see how it would be “tiresome and infuriating in equal measure”.
They wrote: “A similar situation occurred in [redacted] when I was there, which only resulted in unnecessary covertness! Anyway, I hope the library staff are weathering the social media storm.”
The UCD communications office explained how a prompt response was “critical” as “issues grow so fast across social [media]”.
An email from their head of external communications added: “Unfortunately, the visual of this is very emotive so we need to respond with caution and in two steps.”
Another internal email said “weeding” of materials was regularly done in most libraries but could be an “unpleasant job” because it was impossible to please everybody.
The message said: “A library is not an archive (although some archives are called libraries, it’s complicated), so it is not a warehouse as many people may think.”
Asked about the records, UCD did not reply to a request for comment.
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