SRRT (Social Responsibilities Round Table)

last person joined: 4 days ago 

The Social Responsibilities Round Table works to make ALA more democratic and to establish progressive priorities not only for the Association, but also for the entire profession. Concern for human and economic rights was an important element in the founding of SRRT and remains an urgent concern today. SRRT believes that libraries and librarians must recognize and help solve social problems and inequities in order to carry out their mandate to work for the common good and bolster democracy.

Learn more about SRRT on the ALA website.

What are we to keep? thoughts on the National Collection (DttP Spring 2015 feature article)

  • 1.  What are we to keep? thoughts on the National Collection (DttP Spring 2015 feature article)

    Posted May 04, 2015 10:04 AM

    I've written a piece for GODORT's journal Documents to the People (DttP) about the future of the national collection (aka FDLP collections). I hope you'll read and comment on "What are we to keep? Thoughts on the national collection" as well as the What are we to keep? FAQ which gives more context and additional bibliography.



    The question of “how many copies” of print documents the FDLP should collectively keep is the wrong question asked for the wrong reasons and trying to answer it will only lead to the wrong answers and irreparable loss of information. For me, even thinking about answering it raises more questions. How can we know how many copies to keep unless we specify the purposes for which we wish to keep them? What are those purposes? How will we know if we are meeting our goals? How will discarding paper benefit users? How can we be sure that we are not losing information when we discard paper copies if we do not have an inventory of the paper copies that exist? How can we implement a policy that is so vague that it doesn’t define things like “a requisite number of copies,” and how decisions will be made, and which apparently treats a born-digital XML document created by GPO and an indifferent digitization without OCR text and missing its maps and foldouts as of equal value?


    Let’s be clear. We are talking about the records of our democracy. Loss of even a single page could damage the ability of historians, journalists, economists, and citizens to understand our history and hold our government accountable for it successes and its failures. We have those documents now in our libraries; there are not hundreds or even dozens of copies of these documents floating around in used bookstores or elsewhere. They are in our charge.