Stanford cuts down on clutter by removing 70,000 books from its Engineering Library

By Vlad Savov posted Jul 12th 2010 5:09AM

Guess this is one way to tighten your belt. Stanford University has opted to drastically reduce the catalog of physical volumes within its Engineering Library down from its original 80,000 to a svelte 10,000 copies. Before you cry foul and analogize between this and the prep school that threw out all its paper books, note that we're mostly talking about periodicals here, which tend to be used for quick references -- something that the newly digitized and searchable copies will probably make a lot easier. This action was prompted when the University noticed a large proportion of its leafy volumes hadn't left their shelves for over five years, and now the librarians are all aflutter with excitement about using the freed up space and resources for more productive causes. Such as educating us on the unappreciated benefits of indexing.