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]