From: Ari Belenkiy <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 22:03:22 -0700

Dear Rick,

Could you please provide a relevant statistics?

Eg, out of 1000 books (or whatever is in your collection) for last 5
years 100 books were not check out at all, 200 were checked once, etc.

This distribution would be an invaluable resource for a good
statistical argument.

Ari Belenkiy
SFU
Canada


On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 9:17 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 11:12:32 +0000
>
>
> >Rick, I take your point, but I'm puzzled by your claim that "an awful
> >lot of these books probably shouldn't be published." Why not?
>
> Because in the case of many of these books, virtually no one needs to use
> them or wants to read them. They are purchased by institutions in the
> (mistaken) hope that they will prove useful to the scholars or students
> those institutions serve, but instead they end up sitting on shelves and
> are never (or virtually never) used. This is not necessarily any
> reflection on the quality of the scholarship they contain ‹ it¹s a
> reflection on their relevance, which is, very often, so narrow and limited
> as to make them effectively useless to anyone except the authors (whose
> tenure bids they made possible).
>
> Please note: I am not saying this is the case for all scholarly
> monographs, only that it is the case for too many of those that are
> published and then purchased by libraries.
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
> Marriott Library, University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]