I'm not a librarian but I was wondering about the question in the subject line. Someone posted it on another board and I haven't a clue.

Thanks!

-Nancy

I think they mostly ignore them. I mean, libraries ignore most books, both insofar as they acquire a tiny fraction and as regards consideration as well. Libraries have a variety of formal and informal filters between them and drinking from the new-book firehose, which has been getting heavier and heavier for a long time, even without Lulu and etc.

Self-published books get totally ignored. Simple as.

The only exceptions would be those of local interest, by and large. And even then there'd have to be a compelling reason to take them on.

It's not completely outside the bounds of possibility that someone might put in a request for a self-published book, but unless (and most times even if) it can be purchased through the usual channels, it'll be turned down.

For the ones they do purchase, they process them just like the bestsellers, although they sometimes have to create their own record for the item in order to put it in to their catalog.

I raised this very issue back in November 2007, see http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.ph... .

The book I was holding up was Jason Fried/37Signal's Getting Real, one of the most influential web design books of the decade. It was self-published. (It helped that it was also available online; I have the printed edition.) As a result, even though it outsold 90% of competing titles, WorldCat knows of only three copies in libraries—MIT, CalTech and the University of Nebraska. (Some cataloger in Nebraska deserves an award.) The Library of Congress doesn't have a copy either.

In general, this stuff doesn't matter much. But the failure of libraries around the country and the world to pick up such a significant title is a real embarrassment.

I work at the University of Maine-Orono, and as the largest library in Maine, we have a vested interest in acquiring materials about local history and culture, many of which are published by a variety of vanity presses or are in manuscript form. And when we acquire them, they go to me or to the other professional cataloger for original cataloging and we add them to OCLC and to our own local catalog.

I don't know what percentage of materials our acquisitions department keeps of what's available out there, but I certainly see a lot of such volumes cross my desk every month.

Really, you're larger than Bowdoin, for example? I can't help feeling jealous. Why does the biggest city in Maine not have the best university?

According to this , Bowdoin acquired its 1 millionth "volume" in 2006. According to this, Fogler has 1 million volumes, 1.6 million microforms, and 2.2 million federal documents, not counting periodicals subscriptions or online periodical databases. (And don't tell me that microforms and federal documents "don't count." If I have to catalog them, they count!)

As far as the biggest city and the best university goes, I got my MLS at the University of Illinois, which is the 5th largest library in the country, but it's in an urban area of around 100,000 -- much smaller than Chicagoland's 9 million + inhabitants. Go figure.

Message edited by its author, Mar 26, 2008, 3:15pm.

Unfortunately, many self-published books are poorly written and edited (editing depends on the services the company they go through provides & what the author is prepared to pay for it).

Librarians pass most of them by unless the author manages to get them reviewed by a creditable journal and the book gets a favorable review. That's a rarity, I'm afraid.

Occasionally a self-published author will mail me a copy of their book in the hopes that I will buy it. And sometimes local authors will come into the library with a copy book for me to look at in the same hope. I really, really hate it when they do that. Why? Because then I have to find a way to gently tell them I can not buy it.

I am a children's librarian. And I have to tell you, that 99.9% of self-published children's picture books have the WORST illustrations that can possibly be imagined. Even if the story is half-way good, the illustrations sink such a book. And the fiction for older kids, where illustration isn't all that important is usually poorly written and trite and boring. I did buy one self-published book a few years ago; the author was local and the novel was historical fiction set in our area. The book wasn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but not bad either. But no matter how much I displayed it and book talked it, it never circulated much. The cover was such that kids turned their noses up at it and it languished. And kids do judge books by their cover!

The special review publications for librarians are American Libraries, Library Journal, and Choice (academia). I'm sure there must be others, say, in children's librarianship that I am unaware of.

Oh, yes. Booklist, Horn Book, School Library Journal, and Science Books & Films, for example.

Surely Science Books would be interested in Getting real?

Perhaps, but the author would need to submit it to them for review--and that doesn't guarantee that they WOULD review it.

See http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2...

I did a major blog post on this topic. Spread far little blog post!

An interesting topic.

As a librarian, who has worked in a deposit library (State Library of Victoria, in Australia), I have had my share of self published product sent across my desk.

Getting Real is unfortunately an exception. Most self-published material is self-published for a reason....it's not good enough for a publisher to risk money on.

When we talk about filtering for choosing texts for a library collection, publishers form the first and perhaps major filter used by libraries. Something published by Oxford University Press, for example, immediately has status as a work worth considering, based purely on the fact that it is published by them. Some libraries set up purchasing plans based on publisher listings.

The purpose of deposit libraries is to catch items that might not be actively purchased by other libraries, to try to ensure that at least one copy might survive and be available for the future. The Library of Congress in the US is one such library, so the fact that Getting Real is not listed indicates that the author has not complied with the depost conditions.

So, we could argue that the fact that Getting Real is not in the LC's catalogue is the fault of the author, rather than that particular library.

If we get to something like Lulu, timspalding is spot on - a lot of it is crap, and librarians simply don't have time to wade through all that muck for the occasional gem that they might find, when there is enough "validated" material available - whether by being commercially published, or recommended to the library - to spend their (often limited) budgets.

If Getting Real is as influential as it is claimed to be, I'm surprised that more libraries don't have it, as I imagine that faculty/students would be recommending to their libraries to purchase it.

It must be remembered that Librarians are not necessarily experts in any field (although in my 20 year career I have been constantly surprised by the deep expertise and knowledge of some librarians, just as I have been appalled at the ignorance of others). They rely on other experts, whether in publishing, or the general public, to guide their purchases.

The web and e-publishing has added another layer to the acquisitions cake - many libraries have been slow to jump on the ebook bandwagon, although that is changing. The problem of sifting these titles is in fact harder than with printed texts, as it costs next-to-nothing to produce an ebook compared to a paper one.

Message edited by its author, Mar 27, 2008, 1:51am.

#15: If Getting Real is as influential as it is claimed to be, I'm surprised that more libraries don't have it, as I imagine that faculty/students would be recommending to their libraries to purchase it.

I doubt that students do much recommending at all. For us, apathy is a virtue. ;)

Some thoughts:

1. Lulu represents a shift from traditional "vanity presses." Sure, you get some of that. But a lot of people are publishing that way because it cuts out stuff they don't need. Publishers filter some, but they don't filter that much. Most books are crap, period and end of paragraph. Lulu books are crap more often. So what? And if filtering is one factor, not having to wait a year, not having to ask permission and being able to keep almost all the money are much bigger factors. Even with a free version, Getting Real make about $60k. If libraries think Lulu is just a vanity press, well, they're the only people who think so. Certainly nobody at the last publishing conference I attended thought so.

2. "the fault of the author." Depository lbraries also collect to fill in gaps. They aren't passive. If they were, they'd collect nothing older than a few years.

3. "the fault of the author." Getting Real doesn't even have an ISBN. They didn't care to give it one. And so what? They don't care if a few libraries hold their nose and buy it.

4. I think a quick look at the Lulu best-seller list—most of which are not available for free—shows that libraries are just ignoring this whole phenomenon. But the fact that GR was available as an ebook first, and that it is now available for free are problems. Of course, you could buy the top ten Lulu books for the price of a single Brill monograph...

5. This whole thing is strange insofar as libraries collect a lot of completely marginal stuff. There are all sorts of libraries that positively fight over zines or some marginal pamphlet produced by the Nuclear Freeze movement and read by fifty people. Missing the explosion of "self-publishing?" It's just amazing to me.

I work in a deposit library; one of our special focuses is the local history of towns in Flanders. There are around 700 local history societies, and they all publish magazines and monographies; only very few of these do so through commercial publishers. It's a real PITA to keep up with them, first of all because it's difficult to find out what's being published, and secondly because it's almost impossible to order these things. Bookstores don't carry them. The only lead you get is the home telephone number of the president or treasurer of the local history group, who is of course not at home during business hours.

We also collect current Dutch literature, including gray literature, private press stuff, and self-published books. Fortunately, there are a few antiquarians and bookstores that follow these up too and they keep us informed. But still, a lot passes through unnoticed, even though we try very hard to acquire all of it.

Because we are a government institution, we can only buy stuff after sending out an order form, which is of course not possible with most online print-on-demand websites (or amazon, or eBay).

Fortunately for us, e-publishing hasn't taken off yet in these domains; when it does, it will further complicate the matter. We're working on storage for these web-only publications, but as for cataloguing them and especially tracking them down, we still have a long road ahead of us.

Much to my constant chagrin as a cataloger, we tend to accept all self published donations due to our large local authors collection. However, we usually will not place them in other portions of the library and with certain rare exceptions we will not purchase any.

There are all sorts of libraries that positively fight over zines or some marginal pamphlet produced by the Nuclear Freeze movement and read by fifty people.

But surely that is, at least in part, because some libraries have specialized areas of collecting. There is a difference between wanting a pamphlet that documents the history of a social movement, and purchasing any old self-published tripe that comes along.

My previous place of work was a public library where one of my duties was selection of materials for the 800s. I got a small amount of donations from local residents who had books of poetry they had self-published. My inclination was to add every donation of self-published poetry to our collection, because I felt it was important for a public library to have local authors in its collection. But my supervisor pointed out that if I did that, I would be opening the door for more and more donations of this kind, and we might not have the space on our shelves for such a collection--if I didn't start saying no now, it would be harder to say no in the future. I saw her point, but it killed me to not add it to the collection, even though all of the donated poetry was, in my opinion, really bloody awful, and the odds of anyone actually checking any of it out was slim to none.

In any case, I think it's weird that libraries don't add more self-published materials to their collections.

>21 "In any case, I think it's weird that libraries don't add more self-published materials to their collections."

Only, it's not so weird. You said it yourself - it's really bloody awful, and highly unlikely that anyone will check it out.

"You said it yourself - it's really bloody awful, and highly unlikely that anyone will check it out."

Yeah, but that doesn't go for all self-published materials. Plus, libraries have selected books by famous authors, published by big companies, that didn't circulate so well.

My local library will accept self-published works for circulation, but they review the books before they will add them to the catalog.

>Only, it's not so weird. You said it yourself - it's really bloody awful, and highly unlikely that anyone will check it out.

Right. So the number one seller on Lulu—probably 100,000 sold copies?—is not going to be checked out of a library. Getting Real isn't going to be checked out? Anyway, if quality is decisive we should burn 2/3 of all books in libraries now.

I just checked out Harlequin romances at my local library—a small city library. We're *flush* with them.

#3: "The only exceptions would be those of local interest, by and large. And even then there'd have to be a compelling reason to take them on."

I once worked at a library with a majority of African-American patrons. If numerous patrons began to request the same self-published book (usually "urban fiction") we'd get hold of a few.

I believe that self-published books are usually self-published for a reason: They stink. But if a library's holdings include Harold Robbins and Mills & Boon books, it kinda throws a monkey wrench into the argument that they can exclude self-published books on the grounds that they lack literary merit.

The way things are handled in our system is that our collections management department purchases books based on specific criteria and favorable revies, and listings, such as NYT Best sellers. If a book is self-published, then there are two avenues for the author to get it into the library. Patron response, as in patrons requesting it, and after a certain number of requests, it is purchased, or peer review on a local level if it has some kind on intrinsic historical vlaue.

Even if a work is purchased, it still has to pass the standards for circulation, and if it does not circulate it is eventually discarded.

So a goodly number of books are self published, but few make it to the library shelves, at least in our system.