Declutter

Lincoln historian Jim McKee tells the story of Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick, whose book collection filled a two-story house.

Filled -- wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

Fitzpatrick began the collection as an organized arrangement. He valued the books above all else, and gradually filled every available space.

The successor owners had different values. They sold off the items that had substantial financial value, and trashed the remainder.

People who knew in general terms what the collection had contained, and who tracked what was "salvaged" lamented the lost intellectual content.

A recent article on the demise of VHS noted that thousands of "silent classic" films from the early 20th Century that had been reformatted and released on VHS in the 1970s and 1980s are once again unavailable until there is sufficient financial incentive for someone to navigate the morass of copyright and content licensing to reissue them in the digital formats currently in use.

Kilgore Memorial Library's VHS collection is going away this year as the library needs the space for new materials. Some titles will be replaced with DVD copies. Many will just go away, following in the wake of Life Magazine back files and other once valued pieces that had to make way for something newer.