Collection Reflection

Quick question about "out of print" books:  Do you buy them for your collections?  If you do not, why not?  If you do, do you only buy one copy?  What's the lowest condition you're willing to get?  What's the most you're willing to pay?  Do you only buy under certain conditions?  (part of a series, classic, local interest, etc?)  And, what do you do if it suddenly gets 60 holds on the single copy? Thanks!

Yesterday, I was casting about for a reasonable weeding project--one that I could complete within a day or two. I am always conscious of the need to weed in my part of the 800s , which includes more than 13,000 items. Sometimes I even make progress toward this end . Then I remembered that I had been planning to pare down the Shakespeare section, which would allow me to create space and clear out some dead weight. I'm not sure what other large public libraries have for Shakespeare in nonfiction; the section here includes the plays and criticism. (There is also a shelf full of the plays among the YA paperbacks.) For the purposes of this weeding project, I only targeted books with the 822.33 label--yes, Shakespeare has his own call number all to himself! When I started this project, we had nearly 600 items with an 822.33 call number that took up approximately 18 shelves. The average publication date of these items was 1969, and a few of the oldest were from the 1800s. One of the...

Patron: "Do you have any GED books?" Librarian: "Uh, mayyyyybe, let me check. Sorry, not right now. Can I put one on hold for you?" Replace "GED" with books on witchcraft or sex; titles by Stephen King or Sister Souljah's  The Coldest Winter   Ever ; memoirs like A Child Called "It " ; almost any popular DVD you can name, especially horror films; rock and rap CDs . . . this interaction plays itself out with depressing regularity. A quick check of the catalog shows that my library (just this building, not any of the branches or the extensive network we belong to) has purchased 26 copies of The Coldest Winter Ever , all but three of which have disappeared from the collection. They've been stolen, lost, or taken home and never returned. Each time we purchase one of these items new (in paperback) and process it for circulation to the public, the cost is around $8.00, meaning that we've spent over $200 just to keep one book on the shelf...