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Speaker 1: The National Library wants to destroy half a million unwanted

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Speaker 1: books from its collection. The libraries is most of the

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Speaker 1: titles have not been issued for the last twenty to

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Speaker 1: thirty years, and attempts to donate the books in the

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Speaker 1: past have only resulted in modest pickup. Mark Crookston is

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Speaker 1: the director of Content Services at the National Library with

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Speaker 1: us Now, how.

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Speaker 2: Mark, hello, Heather, how are you very well?

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Speaker 3: Thank you? What kind of books are we talking about?

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Speaker 2: The books are predominantly nonfiction, over ninety percent of them

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Speaker 2: in non section. Most of them were published in the

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Speaker 2: middle of last century, so from about the nineteen thirties

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Speaker 2: about the nineteen eighties, and they were either inherited by

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Speaker 2: the National Library when the National Library came about in

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Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five, or collected soon after that for the

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Speaker 2: purposes of supporting people wanting to borrow them who couldn't

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Speaker 2: get them from their own library, their own public library.

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Speaker 2: So the National Library provides a lending service to other

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Speaker 2: libraries to support via communities.

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Speaker 3: What kind of books are we talking about?

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Speaker 2: So the nonfection predominantly that covers the whole range of

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Speaker 2: subjects across the Jewy decimal classification. So a couple that

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Speaker 2: caught my eye that when I've walked through there got

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Speaker 2: thousands of travel guides and travel compendiums, for example.

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Speaker 3: The people are redundant.

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Speaker 2: That's right. Well, people get their travel information from sources

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Speaker 2: that are not from mid twentieth century travel guides or

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Speaker 2: travel stories. Things like. There's a lot of technical information

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Speaker 2: in there, a lot of sort of technical mathematics books,

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Speaker 2: technical DIY books for people who are wanting to do

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Speaker 2: DIY related.

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Speaker 3: Which is also redundant, isn't it because of videos?

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Speaker 2: All right? That's right. You can get your sources from

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Speaker 2: a range of different places now rather than a mid century.

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Speaker 1: Some of the books, though, are not as crappy as that,

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Speaker 1: because apparently the owner of how to Find Books reckons

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Speaker 1: that some of these books would retail for three hundred

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Speaker 1: to five hundred dollars. He's cited the example of a

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Speaker 1: two volume set bibliography of UFO books from the nineteen fifties.

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Speaker 1: Have you tried to sell the books?

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Speaker 2: We did not consider sale as one of the options.

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Speaker 2: We have a policy on removal and disposal and that's

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Speaker 2: available on the National Library.

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Speaker 3: Does your policy exclude trying to sell the books?

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Speaker 2: No, it doesn't. It says that in terms of considerations,

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Speaker 2: it considers transfer, donation, sale destruction. So we undertook the

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Speaker 2: transfer option. We had our own experts go through the

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Speaker 2: collection and we selected about thirty thousand items to come

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Speaker 2: into another part of the National Library's collection that we

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Speaker 2: held other libraries. We made the list available to other

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Speaker 2: libraries and they selected about fifteen thousand. We donated some

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Speaker 2: to charities a few years ago for sale revenue generation

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Speaker 2: for them that proved to be largely unsuccessful and largely

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Speaker 2: reinforced what what. What we thought about this is that

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Speaker 2: there's not that much demand for these books, okay, and

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Speaker 2: we considered sale, but it's quite an expensive undertaking and.

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Speaker 1: Because of the man hours that it would take to

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Speaker 1: sort of take the books, take the books out to

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Speaker 1: the curb, put them on some trolleys, label them with

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Speaker 1: one dollar each.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's easy to think that, you know,

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Speaker 2: it's quite a simple process, but its intensive. It is.

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Speaker 2: It's very labor intensive. It's to the tune of several

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Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of dollars that we didn't think was

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Speaker 2: good use of taxpayers money for items that are not

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Speaker 2: New Zealand or Pacific items, which is what our concentration

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Speaker 2: and our purpose is in the National Library of New Zealand.

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Speaker 2: They're not They're from a lending collection that's not being

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Speaker 2: l they're not wanted, and spending several hundred thousand dollars

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Speaker 2: in order to prepare them for sale. We didn't think

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Speaker 2: was particular. Listen, what are you doing?

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Speaker 3: Do you just shove them through a shredder?

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Speaker 2: Well, we don't do that specifically. These commercial operations in

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Speaker 2: New Zealand that have documented document destruction services, Hey brilliant.

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Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Mark, I really appreciate you on this.

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Speaker 1: Mark Crookston, Director of Content Services the National Library.

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