Hey, I appreciated your discussion of the ongoing conversation in library ethics. One point of clarification: is the 'we take no responsibility for the content we simply provide access' attitude normally applied to, say, a significantly out of date encyclopaedia? I know the boundary between 'neutral' fact and politicised fact is blurry at best and non existent at worst but for example a map with countries that don't exist any more or descriptions of two species dinosaurs that have been decided to be the same is the kind of thing that I think would want even the most neutral library to be able to weed out out of date information on. I know the internet is now acting as most people's reference material, but libraries predate that so presumably it's factored into the ethics debate.
Thanks for the ask! When I was making my posts I was more focused on more contemporary materials that wouldn’t be weeded due to poor circulation among patrons and such so I didn’t factor in material like encyclopedias and the like.
What we weed is largely dependant on how much room we have, whether or not the material is relevant to the community, and how often it’s checked out. Out of date encyclopedia’s are most likely weeded because of the concern for how much room we have and poor circulation. No one wants an outdated encyclopedia. The fact it’s out of date might prove another reason it’s weeded but it wouldn’t be the only reason and it would vary from library to library on why the encyclopedias were actually weeded.
But yeah, most of the time it’s not because of what’s in the book but because it’s begun to circulate poorly and we need that space it’s taking up for other things! If we weed an encyclopedia there is a chance we will replace it with new encyclopedia but that’s more to due the fact we think the new encyclopedia would circulate more and provide the community with information it supposedly wants.
But it does depend on what library policy states. Because encyclopedias could be treated like serials (we have a term for encyclopedias and the like but my brain is FAILING me and I can’t remember if it’s a serial or that other one) we could only have the three most recently published editions or we could be swapping out the encyclopedia each time a new one is published. It all depends on policy and community need.
Anyway, hopes this helps.