Like many (maybe even most) of my colleagues, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to allocate a suddenly diminished materials budget. Only a year ago our biggest worry was how to deal with serials inflation in an environment that offered insufficient budget increases. Those were apparently the good old days. Now we’re dealing with double-digit budget cuts and the promise of more to come, and this means (or had better mean) a more fundamental reassessment of our collecting strategies.

Academic libraries are in a tough situation, there’s no question about it. We’re beset on two sides, and it’s almost as if the two sides had coordinated their attacks. From one side, attacking us with a gentle smile and a two-edged sword, is Google, which wasn’t satisfied with being the single easiest and most effective ready-reference tool in the world. It has now become, effectively, the world’s largest, most comprehensive, and easiest-to-use research library.

Our work as librarians has always been the work of making difficult choices, but sometimes it seems like the choices we have to make are getting harder and harder. In this column, I’d like to talk about one that’s so tough we don’t even talk about it: how do we decide what information is not worth the trouble of preserving?

This morning I dragged myself out of bed very early and went running – something I do more frequently than I would prefer, but less frequently than I should. One of the side benefits of going running in the early morning is that it frees up my mind for reflection, and this morning I found myself thinking about my choice of profession.