<p>“…the faculty objected to being told they had just two choices for the wondrous athenaeums: horrible or terrible…Berkeley has reduced its library spending by 12 percent since 2008, even as the University of Michigan, its main public competitor, has spent 24 percent more…”</p>
<p>Thankfully I don’t think they’re destroying the old texts but simply focusing on reducing staff to cut costs. Hopefully the spending can come back to pre-2008 once we’re out of this recession.</p>
<p>Upmagic, I would actually argue that the destruction of old texts - however undesirable - would actually be preferable to the other choices on the table, which seem to consist of the reduction of valuable research librarians or reduced hours, especially during vacation times, but when plenty of people, especially graduate students and faculty, would still like to use them. For example, the copyrights of plenty of works in the humanities and social sciences have long expired and such works are therefore in the public domain. Berkeley’s libraries therefore probably don’t really need to be carrying anymore generic works of Shakespeare or Confucius. {I can understand why Berkeley would carry a rare First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s original works, but if we’re just talking about a generic copy of Shakespeare, I mean, come on, you can read that on Project Gutenberg online for free, buy a cheap used copy of Shakespeare’s complete works on Amazon for less than $10, or if you really hurting for money, borrow it from the Berkeley/Oakland/SF Public libraries.}</p>
<p>Eliminating common or duplicate books from the collection would probably not save much, unless the libraries are overflowing their space or the space could be reclaimed for other uses that need the space. Selling books could get a one time benefit, but probably not much if the books are common ones.</p>