Abstract

This study attempted to discover the problems related to the increasing book disposal trend within academic libraries by analyzing the disposal status over ten years and interviews with the librarians. The analysis utilized Korea Education and Research Information Service provided disposal information from 2010 to 2019. The academic libraries with more than 2 million books had disposed of the most number of books. This trend led to a distinctive decrease in the books’ duplicate copies in terms of the collection composition. The librarians from the organizations, which conducted disposal more than three times and one massive removal within ten years, revealed in the interviews that they discarded many valuable duplicate books. They discussed the importance of digitizing high-value resources and also the limitation imposed by the copyright law. In conclusion, this study pointed out that book disposal can cause changes in the collection composition in the long run and suggested that academic libraries pay attention to these changes. The study also suggested evaluating the discarded books’ values to guide the digitization efforts and count the number of books to include digital book use rights.