National Library in the middle of the first great selection of international books

By Eva Corlett for RNZ

The National Library is in the middle of its project to select 600,000 of its international books.

The titles, which cover a variety of fiction and non-fiction topics, will be offered to local libraries, prison libraries and community groups.

Content Services Director Rachel Esson said the books were hardly used and took up valuable space and resource that could better be used to support New Zealand texts.

The slaughter began in October 2019 and was expected to end in mid-2021, he said.

“It is part of good library practice to observe what is used and what is not.”

Esson said the selection process involved making a long list of titles that were more than 20 years old, published abroad and not being used.

“We have been very transparent. We put up the lists and asked people to work with us to identify what we should retain.”

There have been ongoing conversations with researchers and historians, he said.

“We have been very open and again invite any researcher to come and help us.”

So far, more than 33,000 titles have been retained through the process.

“Libraries continue to grow and we are collecting material from New Zealand, the Pacific and the Maori. That is our primary role, and we add 80,000-100,000 items to that collection a year.”

Esson said it came down to space and resources, adding that it cost $ 1 million to house the collection.

“This is the best use of our resources. When less than 1 percent is used, it is not a good use of New Zealand taxpayers’ money.”

Even if more space and money were available, Esson said, the sacrifice would continue.

“Because they are not being used and because there is access to this material through an international library system. Our job is to store material from New Zealand and help people access what they need from elsewhere.”

He said that he understood that books were an emotional subject.

“We are librarians, we love books and it is still the right thing to do.”

While physical copies of some texts may not be kept, that doesn’t mean they’re not accessible, Esson said.

“We still preserve and collect foreign material, but in a much more limited way to support the collection that we have.”

The way society searched for and accessed knowledge had changed a lot with the advent of online tools, he said.

“The biggest gap in terms of access to material online is Maori and Pacific material from New Zealand – as the National Library, we want to focus on that.”

Esson said his Papers Past platform, which digitizes old New Zealand newspapers, receives 51 million visits a year.

“When you look at what we invested in that and how much more we could do with the resource that is currently used to store these unused books, I think that’s where we could focus our resource.”

He said the library was looking to work with other international libraries to help digitize books that were not yet online.

This is the first major removal for the National Library, which Esson said was “not ideal,” adding that small purges more regularly would be preferable.

What will happen to the books that do not find a home in another library or community group has yet to be decided.