Familiar

Libraries ponder a collective dilemma

Institutions balance the demand for popular titles with the need to carry scholarly books.

If you walked into a Kansas City Public Library last month, you probably could find a book by John Grisham or Janet Evanovich without much trouble.

There might be a wait for the latest books by those authors, but eventually you could get one of the library’s 60 copies of The Innocent Man. Ditto for Plum Lovin’ and its 39 copies.

Fans of Douglass North, a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor from Washington University in St. Louis, would not be as lucky. The system didn’t have any of his books. (Nope, not even Structure and Change in Economic History.)

It is just one more example of an issue that libraries nationwide wrestle with.

How much of its resources should a library commit to buying many copies of the newest best-sellers, the ones that most patrons want to read? And what does that mean for scholarly, but less popular, books?

“The question is, is this the right way to spend our money?” said the library’s executive director, R. Crosby Kemper III. . . .