I been withdrawing cassette tapes and hope to get rid of all of them. Our library director would like to keep some, especially some of our services. We have lots of our services on cassette that have not been cataloged -- I'm not concerned with those.
I'd like to hear what other church libraries are doing about cassettes. I could suggest copying to CDs but that could mean lots of work. Doing a copy to Mp3-CD is another option, but adds a bit more work.
Note: Our current services are on CDs, but not cataloged. Only the recent CDs receive light circulation.
And yes, we have slide projectors, video cassettes, film strips, overhead projectors, card files, etc. Hard to part with our old friends.
Replies
We disposed of them all (as well as VHS tapes) when we reopened in January 2016. I have had people wanting to donate them, but no one wanting to check them out!
When I took over our library 3 years ago, there were only a handful of cassettes which I have now disposed of. Even our CDs are overlooked so I am gradually getting rid of those too, and my son who is our Church IT and Tech officer is saying that even CDs will soon be defunct. I think it will depend a lot on your members. If you have an older congregation then they may take longer to embrace new technology. We are blessed with many young people and young families - I am amazed at how fast even DVDs are fading from interest. The bottom line is if no-one is borrowing why take up valuable real estate space?
We have a wonderful cassette tape collection that is virtually untouched now. A lot of great books on tape and fiction too. Then there are tapes of most all our church services from the 1970's thru the 90's. We were working on putting all our past services on CD but are now looking at offering all of them on-line. So, yes, we are slowing withdrawing all of our cassettes. Seems like a terrible waste but if no one touches them they might as well be gone. We still have a lot of video tapes that do get some use. We even check out VCR's for those that want something we only have on video tape and they no longer have a player.