WICHITA, Kansas — Some Wichita State University faculty and students are concerned that the university’s Ablah Library dumped thousands of materials into the trash without consulting faculty or considering alternatives.
University Libraries Dean Brent Mai said during a town hall meeting on Thursday that the library followed established guidelines on the disposal of university property when it discarded outdated journals, books and other materials over the past few weeks.
He said WSU’s library is shifting toward digital resources, which means a reduction in physical books. Librarians have been weeding out materials that are available digitally or from other sources, he said, or ones that have not been checked out in over a decade.
“The decision-making goes into weighing whether we’re going to use that much space for the storage of something that gets little use or is older,” Mai said.
“I love books. My house is full of books. That’s my preference. However, that’s not how the world works today.”
But some faculty members, including several English and history professors, said Ablah Library should have informed faculty or departmental librarians before trashing the documents.
Fran Connor, chairman of the WSU English department, retrieved several boxes of documents from the library dumpster last week. They included research by former faculty member Walter Merrill about American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
The materials included notes Merrill had written about an upcoming edition of Garrison’s letters that was published by Harvard in the 1970s, Connor said.
“So, it's a wonderful insight into both the working of the department and the making of this important critical edition,” Connor said.
Connor emailed his Faculty Senate library representative, who forwarded the question to Mai at Ablah Library. The library dean said the Garrison letters were donated to the university but never added to its catalog, so they were discarded as part of the normal weeding out process.
“Not every single document that is donated to a library is valuable, and we understand they have to be selective,” Connor said. “But this is primary material that is historically important. They have kept it since 1981, which suggests they thought there might potentially be some value to it.
“This is where transparency would have helped,” he said. “Had the library let us know there was a portion of the Merrill collection that they were planning to get rid of, we could have saved everyone a little bit of trouble.”
During the town hall meeting at Ablah Library, Katie Lanning of the WSU English department asked whether faculty or subject librarians were given the chance to voice their opinions on what should be kept or discarded.
“We did not do that, no,” Mai answered.
“Why not?” Lanning responded.
“It’s our job to make those decisions on your behalf. It’s sort of our realm here,” Mai said.
Mai said the 16 members of the Ablah Library faculty collectively have 23 master’s degrees, several doctorates and more than 300 years of library experience, and they thoughtfully manage collections.
“It’s not something that just happens accidentally,” he said. “Our intent was not to cover anything up. That’s not the thing. If that was the intent, I’m really bad at it.”
Asked why soon-to-be-discarded documents weren’t offered to interested faculty, Mai said he has done that in the past with little success.
“We couldn’t give them away,” he said. “I don’t have journal collections in my office anymore. I hauled them around with me for a couple of decades, and at some point decided that it just wasn’t worth it because what I needed was on my desktop, and that’s where I was going to use it.”
The process of weeding out materials, also known as deaccessioning, is a common practice at libraries. To save space and remain relevant to patrons, libraries regularly review materials and decide which items should be removed.
Some university libraries post their deaccessioning policy online to explain to patrons and the public how the process works. The policy at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, for example, outlines the process and options for disposing of materials, such as returning items to original donors, transferring them to another institution, selling them or securely destroying them.
WSU has not posted its policy online. When faculty began raising questions last week, Mai posted an update titled “What’s Going On in the Libraries?” that includes information about a recent flood and the library’s collection management system.
Lanning, an assistant professor of English, said recent actions raise larger questions about the library’s mission and its communication to faculty and others.
“If the library has a policy that allows them to deaccession materials without talking to the stakeholders with full transparency about their plans, that is a slippery slope,” she said.
“I just think there were other solutions besides something that, personally to me, feels pretty insulting — to see the collection of somebody’s work end up in a dumpster.”
Mai said he plans to visit in person with faculty in several departments, including English and history, to talk about the library’s mission and its weeding out process.
During the town hall, some WSU students also voiced concerns about transparency and the loss of potentially crucial documents.
Connor, the English department chair and a Shakespeare scholar, said university libraries should not discard books or other materials just because they may be accessible online.
“We still think that just browsing the stacks is a way to do scholarship,” he said. “Digital platforms are fantastic, but they have limitations. Print materials are fantastic, but they have limitations. Good research means you use both.”
Lanning agreed.
“We call it the serendipity of discovery — when you’re walking around a library and you find things on the shelves you didn’t even know you were looking for,” she said. “And we don’t want to lose that.”
Suzanne Perez reports on education for KMUW in Wichita and the Kansas News Service.
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