Hello Lance Watsky, and other interested HaSafran-niks:
here are some statistics on DVD usage and replacement, relative to our
collection of ca. 3000 DVDs.
I have found them interesting and useful, and hope you do as well!
At the Wellesley College Library, we own 2725 DVDs, of which 90 have been
discarded; we have been collecting this format since early 2000 (I have
excluded laserdiscs from these statistics), and they have been circulating
from open stacks for about a year (which is when most of the damaged discs
were reported and replaced).
Of these 90 discarded titles:
52 were reported lost or missing,
3 were reported flawed,
20 were reported with unspecified damage,
4 were too scratched to play properly,
3 had cracks,
1 had gotten warped,
and 5 had no reason given as to why they were discarded.
The number of times that these DVDs have circulated varies widely -- a few
DVDs have gone missing without having been checked out at all; one DVD was
checked out 86 times before it became too damaged to use. For the DVDs
that have been damaged in use, the average number of checkouts is 20, and
they are nearly exclusively feature films (as opposed to the many
documentaries and academic films which we also own).
Therefore, we only actually discard 2-3 titles per month; happily, only
about half of the DVDs reported by patrons as "problematic" actually are
damaged enough to need replacement! The other discs usually are either
grubby from handling and need only a cleaning with a $10 "CD cleaner", or
need to be played in a different machine (due to format and/or
regional-coding issues).
Shabbat Shalom,
Kimberley Shaw
Acquisitions Associate
Wellesley College Library
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and are not necessarily endorsed by the AJL
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