Accelerated Pace of Kansas City Public Library’s Book-Culling Process Upsets Volunteers
It’s like “Rainbow’s End”.
Sylvia Stucky, a longtime member of Friends of the Kansas City Public Library, stood in the lobby of the Central Library downtown one day last week and opened her shoulder bag.
“I just saved these from the dumpster this morning,” she said of 10 hardcover books on baseball that included biographies of Dizzy Dean and Joe DiMaggio. She soon would be downstairs standing near three massive boxes, measuring 4 feet high and across, filled with hundreds of other volumes bound for recycling.
“They’re going to the chipper whether we want them to or not,” Stucky said of a situation she considers tragic.
In recent months, Stucky and a core group of other volunteers with the Friends of the Kansas City Public Library have been on what they consider a desperate mission: slowing the “bibliocide” at the Kansas City Public Library’s Central location, where an accelerated weeding out and eventual destruction of many thousands of books has been under way since last fall to make space for upgrades and reconfigurations.
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