Blogging at Inside Higher Ed, Barbara Fister makes the case that ... well, read our title, Not Every Library Has to Preserve All Books, Just in Case. It's Not Feasible. This would be good reading for any campus that has a team looking at library space:

Going into the stacks and taking the books off the shelf one at a time is instructive. Today, I pitched a handbook for secretaries published in the 1980s and career guides from the 1970s. I ditched a shelf of how-to books for budding executives published in the 70s and 80s. (Really, how many of these do we need?) I eighty-sixed software guides for dummies stupid enough to run software that's generations old. These books will not be missed. Even in their prime most of them were never checked out, not even once.

What's even better is that removing books can lead to adding them. When an entire subject area turns out to have no books with a publication date newer than 1975, and we are offering courses in that subject area - or it concerns a region of the world or a topic that is not in the curriculum, but is in the news - it's time to track down book reviews and acquire some more current material.