San Francisco’s 1996 New Main library dumped hundreds of thousands of books

Evidence

With the Old Main needing to be emptied so that it could be repurposed as a museum, the collection was unceremoniously removed to temporary warehousing, while an unspecified proportion of the books were simply dumped in landfill: some estimate 200,000 books, others half a million. — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 914

Categorization

• XREF: A modern mirror of the library disasters traced throughout — Chicago fire, Soviet purges — but this time self-inflicted.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 914