Hi Francesco,
Ah, your post takes me back to my first assignment as a librarian! The programming collection hadn’t been weeded (the term librarians use for maintaining the collection) for 15 years or something and was completely packing the shelves --I distinctly remember removing books on programming a 486, and a beginners guide to Pascal, among other antiques. It was definetly a trip through computer history. Of course, most of those books hadn’t been checked out for 20 years.
Tbh, if you brought a box of outdated programming books to my library, I would probably turn them down flat, and if you just left them (as some people do) I’d likely recycle them.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the thought, some older programming books cover foundational programming concepts. But at public libraries, especially ones where space is limited, the collection is for use. And there are a few sections where currency especially matters: health topics, finance, and computer books being three examples. Few things less useful than getting a book about a language as it was two or three versions ago, especially if there were significant changes in the interim.
