According to The Washington Post, public libraries are tossing little-read classics so that they can make more room on their shelves for popular best-sellers. I think this is a good thing. Public libraries exist so that people can read books for free. Their purpose is not to force-feed the public a canon of Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, and Woolf.
Of course, I still wish more people read To the Lighthouse. But shelf-space is a scarce resource, and a book that isn't being read is just a haven for dust. Given that there is no easy way to distinguish between novels that are "educational" (i.e., "The Classics") and novels that are merely "entertaining" (Grisham, Clancy, Crichton, et. al), I think libraries should rely on popular demand when culling their collection. I'm more likely to trust the wisdom of crowds than the wisdom of literary critics.
When I was researching my book, I relied on my local library for the collected works of Gertrude Stein. (I didn't expect to re-read The Making of Americans for fun at some later point in my life.) I always enjoyed checking the inside flap for past due dates: it was the rare Stein work that had been checked out more than once in the last twenty years. (The exception was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was actually quite popular.) And while I certainly appreciated the library's investment in the modernist classics, I'm not sure Gertrude Stein was the best way to allocate shelf space. We are much better off reading Gertrude Stein here.
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In addition, you can always get the classics on Inter Library Loan, buy inexpensive paperback copies, or download the public domain works from Project Gutenberg.
Perhaps someone with a Master's in Library Science can give a reference to the claim I've heard: the most common number of times any book in a library is borrowed is: zero. The second most common number of times any book in a library is borrowed is: one. Seems reasonable. Zipf's law applies?
I hope that by "throw out" you mean: "put on sale at discount, at annual event." I love those!
This brings up the issue of whether we should be putting more emphasis on building electronic libraries and Googles attempt to make e-libraries accessible to all.
It would be great if one can go to the library and access and read materials via touch screen. I know you have many still going through the archaic card catolog system and reading twenty newspapers instead of going to sites like http://www.enewsreference where thousands of newspapers can be read with just a click of the mouse.
The saying, if God wanted man to read books online he would not have made trees, hold true.
Actually, this is exactly why I always stay away from public libraries. Although they tend to have popular books and a smattering of books on almost all subjects, they rarely have the book I actually want. Maybe I'm spoiled by my university's library, but I like to have access to as many books as possible, because there tend to be just a few that I really want, and I find the library isn't really serving its purpose for me if they don't have the material I'm after.
But then at this point I guess I'm no longer the target audience of a public library.