Getting Rid of Things

I've been throwing things away at work today. In a couple of months, we move to new offices and all we are allowed to take are five boxes - things that will fit into one bookshelf.

When I started in my job, getting on for twenty years ago, I was employed as a maths lecturer. My university had a School of Mathematical Sciences and an undergraduate maths degree. Around the year 2000, recruitment to the degree was low and the Powers-that-Be decided to close the degree so that the department could concentrate on Computer Science. At the same time, there was what I believe was called (without any trace of irony) a "rationalisation" in the School of Applied Sciences which meant a closure in their Physics course. The university Library, which was moving premises at the time, saw an opportunity to reclaim some shelf space from books in areas that obviously were dead subjects, and decided to sell off the maths and physics stock for something ridiculous like 25 pence per book. I think in the end, they started selling off even cheaper than that in lots of two or three. Despite my relatively impecunious state as a lecturer, I decided that this was a bargain and bought most of them - they even threw in the History and Philosophy of Science books into the sale as well, which were clearly never going to be needed again. So I ended up with about 600 books on pure and applied maths, statistics, physics, the history of mathematics, and the history and philosophy of science. Some were classics - Dirac's "Quantum Mechanics", a full set of the Landau-Lifschitz series on theoretical physics, or Rene Taton's "General History of the Sciences" - others were purchased just because of the title - I wanted to be able to say I had read a book called "Jewels of Formal Language Theory". Some were bought because I thought they were too important to be scrapped - reasonable copies of Newton's "Opticks" or Boole's "Laws of Thought" - while yet others were investments in futures that didn't arrive for me - Weinberg's "Quantum Theory of Fields" or  Conway's "On Numbers and Games".

So they have stayed on the shelves of my office over the past decade, occasionally dipped into in the rare times when there was space to appreciate them but mostly just being there as a reminder that I was part of a tradition of learning that was over a thousand years old, going back to Bologna and Paris and Oxford. And I imagined the mindset of monks, both the black monks of 6th century Europe, and the Albertian Order of Liebowitz.

So now the School (now, of Computing Science and Digital Media) is moving to new premises. No longer will academic staff have individual rooms in which to meet students and discuss their progress. Instead we will have a shiny, new, open-planned office with card-controlled entry which stops students coming near us, and access to "Open-Learning spaces" and coffee shops. And lecturers will have a small desk, and one bookshelf each. One bookshelf - five shelves holding four linear metres. My own home is already cluttered with books and my kids are growing up and need their own space. Not much room there. So I have to decide what stuff from my office will come with me and what will go. Some of the books have already been put on a table outside the School office labelled "Free Books for Keen Students!" but these are mostly new programming books. Besides our Computer Science student would have to be quite keen indeed to pick up Birkhoff and MacLane's "A Survey of Modern Algebra" or Cartan's "Theory of Spinors".

But if I can take one bookshelf's worth, what about the other stuff. Photocopies of papers from my time as a physicist... PhD work... that I spent years trying to get to grips... the mathematical intricacies of quantum groups, the physical characteristics of quantum optical states. Most of these have gone today. It's difficult to explain to someone who hasn't spent an extended period of their time focussed on a problem, such as that required for a PhD, just why this was so difficult. Just saying that you become attached to papers seems silly, and of course, they can always be ordered again in dire emergencies. But it still felt bad. It, did however, put off the time when harder choices about books need to be made.

So does it matter? Does it matter that I will no longer have access to resources from fields in which I no longer teach? Why should the university provide me with space to keep my private library on their premises?

Well I suppose I could cite short-sightedness. As well as the maths and physics, the Library also sold off much of its statistics collection. Given our current academic predilection for "Big Data", that now seems a little premature. The books in my room were never really mine. They could be used by anybody who wanted them. Now, it seems, we will rely on the web and more modern texts that contain more modern maths and stats. I don't anticipate that the mathematics of quasitriangular Hopf algebras will be making a big impact in computer science any time soon, but you can never tell. It's in the nature of mathematics to be productive, and to be productive in ways that we don't understand before it happens.

But in a way, I am less upset about the technical books than the loss of books on the history and philosophy of science. I seem to recall that it was once considered something of a virtue to be well-read in these subjects. The notion that being able to have a broad overview of the role and impact of the sciences in the context of the humanities was a "good thing". I'm not sure that university decision-makers - who may not even be academics - think that anymore. And that makes me sad.