* This story is an excerpt from Matty Lamp’s second feature piece on her capstone blog, “Let’s Get Physical”.
WEST LIBERTY– Some of my most formative memories as a child were spent at the public library.
The library was a magical place where I could spend hours kicking my feet and wobbling around in the hard plastic, slime green, egg-shaped chairs in the kid’s non-fiction section while learning the ins-and-outs of ancient Egypt, herb harvesting, and various forms of cultural witchcraft.
I was sort-of an odd kid, but I had a love for knowledge as deep as the Nile.
As I got older, I stopped reading for fun when I got to high school and had to push through the tedious required texts and books that I’m sure were culturally relevant, but I found very boring. But, I always kept a warm fondness for the library as a concept. Where else could you find every genre of literature you could think of, along with computers, printers, and regular community activities geared towards people of all ages, all for free?
Clearly, I’m not the only young person that appreciates the library, because a 2023 study from Portland State University found that 23% of Gen Z and millennials say they had visited a physical library in a twelve-month period, but they did not identify as readers. Just like me, these participants cited the welcoming atmosphere, community programming, and access to free resources like printers as reasons why they chose to attend libraries in person.
As we’ve seen an increase in library patrons choosing to borrow e-books and audiobooks digitally from their local libraries and people streaming music through online platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, there remains a section in the library that people today seem to forget about as it collects dust: the CD section.
In r/libraries on Reddit, user gallantpride asked “I’m trying to quit using the internet for music and go back to CDs. Libraries tend to have large CD sections, but I’m not sure how popular they are. Do music CDs still get checked out a lot? Or are they going the way of VHS tapes in the mid 2000s?”
The OP’s question got mixed results:
“CDs are super popular at my library. We still add anywhere from 20-30 per month. They’re almost harder to weed than books,” Most-Toe1258 replied. “We’re in the process of starting a vinyl collection and having to make some tough decisions to make room for it.”
The user also made note of the fact that many of the CDs their library buys are newer indie, pop, and hip-hop releases, and only some of their regular patrons are older folks. They are also part of a library system, so their CDs are often interloaned to other locations.
Interestingly, the size of the library system might have something to do with the success of their CD section. Keladry-ofmindelan explained, “I’m part of a 6-library system in the northwest US and we have a pretty decent sized CD collection, as well as books on CD. We probably pull 20-30 a week for holds, and we do buy new albums, just not in large quantities and often by patron request.”
On-the-veldt replied, “we have about ten or so regulars, they each check out a half dozen to a dozen CDs a week. every single week. all retirement-age white men, all thankfully nice…if it wasn’t for them I don’t know if we’d have the collection that we do, but they absolutely keep our numbers up.”
While some libraries’ CD sections seem to be thriving despite a decrease in people using CDs overall, others opted to get rid of their collections completely due to obsoletion.
“Our collection became so unpopular that they stopped ordering new CDs in 2019. The existing collection is housed at one location,” MissyLovesArcades said. “I can’t recall the last time I checked out a CD, it’s been at least 7-years since I purchased one. I don’t even have a CD player in my car anymore, and that’s where I would listen to them.”
“We are removing our collection in the new year. I just ran a report for the year to check and we had 93 circs all year of the entire collection of 1789 CDs,” Starteadrop said.
On a chilly afternoon in early February, I pulled into a meter spot along Market Street in Wheeling, West Virginia and made my hike to the Ohio County Library to meet my first librarian contact, Makayla Carney. She is the library’s Director of Marketing and Web Development.
As I parsed through the drawers of CDs next to the glass exhibit of artifacts from Wheeling’s history, Carney explained to me how the library determines what stays in the their collection and what gets eliminated…
Check out the rest of Matty’s story here!
