Weeding is Fundamental Revisited

This episode of 99% Invisible explores the practice of "weeding" at libraries, which involves removing books to make space for new ones. The story focuses on the San Francisco Public Library after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, when a large number of books were discarded under the direction of city librarian Kenneth Dowlin, who was focused on modernizing the library with technology. This led to a conflict with a group of librarians, dubbed the "Guerrilla Librarians," who sought to preserve the books and document the extent of the weeding. The conflict escalated when author Nicholson Baker got involved and accused the library of destroying books. The episode also delves into the history and purpose of a "backward index," a catalog of words typed backward, used by lexicographers at Merriam-Webster before the advent of computers to identify patterns and create rhyming dictionaries.