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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
giardini wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
The article's author is only the second person I have known to speak
fondly of Derrida, the first being a young relative who lost his soul
AND brain to various claptrap at university.
etempleton wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
Libraries purge books from their collections continuously all the time.
It has happened forever.
FiatLuxDave wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
The Great Pulping is the name, or rather names, that modern historians
have given to two legendary events which were supposed to have occured
early in the Confusion Era. The first of these events was when
libraries converted from a primarly paper-based form of information
storage to a digital form. A majority of library book collections were
scanned, digitized, and then once the information was stored in digital
forms, the books were sold to be pulped in order to free up room for
library patrons to use the new system more effectively. Of course, the
librarians could not know what was going to happen in the future to all
this information, what with the viruses, cross-copying, AI
hallucinations, archival rivalries, meme wars, and all the other
diverse information-distorting causes of the Confusion.
The second event refers to what happened to the librarians who had been
responsible for this decision, when the full effects of it became
evident.
- A legendarium of the Confusion Era, by Franklin Duane, 192 PCE
Edition
rmason wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
Mu sister and I gave my late parents sizeable library to the East
Lansing public library, a place the entire family adored. They gave
us a document that detailed that most of the books would be sold and
the money would be used to support the library. We were OK with that
and knew in advance that would happen. They have two large sales a
year and receive more money than if they just sold them to a broker and
the books stay in the community.
This doesn't happen everywhere. I have an old friend who like me is a
fan of Michigan history. Every time he bought a book on his rural
county or its towns he'd give a copy to his local library. Twenty
years in he found out they were just selling them to brokers for ten to
twenty percent of the cover price. Now he gives the list price of the
book to the library with the understanding they use it for books of
history.
jswelker wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
I was a real university librarian for a decade. Most of the books they
throw away are truly garbage. Yes some libraries take it too far with
"weeding" too much, but it is necessary:
1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said
purpose might not be secured)
2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff
much harder
3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of
courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing
Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite
good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.
tokai wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
I worked at an university library that was being moved to a new, and
smaller, location. We did a lot of weeding. I threw thousands of books
in the dumpster. We had to be covert in our work so the student body
wouldn't act up. Much like the author here.
No library will ever just throw books out randomly. Most works are
available from many dozen of other libraries and not even close to
lost if thrown out. Inter library loan insures that they can always be
gotten should a user need them. Shelve space is not infinite, and books
not being used out blocks space for works that are in use.
Tools like worldcat and familiarity with the fields the library's
collection cover, helps avoid weeding rare and unique works. Librarians
are well aware of their library's forte. A single library isn't the
world repository of knowledge. The network of collaboration between all
national and academic libraries is.
warumdarum wrote 1 day ago:
At least they didnt shredder it and scan the pieces. Thats where the
rainbow ends.
roughly wrote 1 day ago:
This paragraph made me chuckle:
> When Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her will bequeathed
her library to the sons of two friends of hers. The first, William
Royall Tyler, Jr., stored his half in a warehouse on the outskirts of
London. The other half went to Colin Clark, who let the books molder
for decades at his family castle in Kent until financial troubles
prompted his brother to begin selling off chunks of it to various
dealers in rare books. Clarkâs half was painstakingly recovered and
brought back to the Mount, but the other half was destroyed in 1941,
during the London Blitz.
Man plans, and God laughs, as they say.
apitman wrote 1 day ago:
Rainbows End
arjie wrote 1 day ago:
Modern public libraries primarily serve other purposes than paper book
lending. University libraries donât face that constraint but with the
Library of Congress and Google we have a safe copy for surviving
civilizations. So the only question now is how one accesses the
content.
Iâve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and
I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for
myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to
have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself.
Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not,
perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a
future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that
are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.
CalChris wrote 1 day ago:
Berkeley has the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond, CA for
this very purpose. Iâve checked out books where they crackled as I
opened them and it was clear I was the first to read them.
HTML [1]: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
It would be nice if there was a rule allowing unwanted books to be
destructively scanned and put online in the public domain.
Maybe publishers could have the right to purchase the books back at
current list price or something if they want to block the shredding.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
I like the premise but it sounds like something where the overhead in
trying to track & manage that would be overly burdensome for all
parties until you just forced more reasonable terms on when material
enters the public domain in the first place, at which point such a
system wouldn't really be needed anyways. The last thing I want to
see to try to clean up public access to work is even more complex
rules and systems being layered on top of the existing system.
ck2 wrote 1 day ago:
vaguely reminds me of the library massacre at New College
* [1] *
HTML [1]: https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/d4018abd-6789-46ea-83bc-092fddc31368...
HTML [2]: https://abcnews.com/US/books-dumped-en-masse-floridas-new-coll...
jjkaczor wrote 1 day ago:
As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so,
these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool
empty libraries picking up random books as a child.
OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so
everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same".
Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge),
where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
You can get the 8-bay Synology, with its two expansion chassis that's
room for about eighteen 24tb drives. Anna's Archive, Libgen, and
archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even
knowing what titles to download. For the first year or so, you have
big long lists of things you know you must have, but even though you
didn't quite write them all out (often you just jot down "everything
by [author's name]" you eventually finish that up. You start grabbing
every book title/cover you see anywhere... and though I'm not
particularly proud of it, 4chan often outperforms HN (and though no
one would believe it, most of those aren't Mein Kampf).
Really, we need a gigantic bibliography project of some sort. These
2648 titles are the core computer science bibliography would be a big
help. Or these 17,852 titles are the core 1970s harlequin romance
novels.
>Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End"
(Vinge), where physical books get digitized, t
He wasn't able to predict that they'd just shred the books without
bothering to digitize them though.
jjkaczor wrote 1 day ago:
That's actually what I did - upgraded from a 5-bay Synology to an
8-bay in December (before HD prices skyrocketed even further than
they had since my last NAS build), still have a couple free slots,
but doubled my overall available storage space. eBooks are not the
bulk of what is one there though...
buildsjets wrote 1 day ago:
Digitalization through a destructive process is what was used to
train or future overlords.
HTML [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
deaux wrote 1 day ago:
> since a state universityâs property, even if itâs been deemed
trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals.
Gotta love how as hundreds of billions of tax dollars are being
misappropriated through corruption, state university books about to be
trashed can't be taken home supposedly to prevent corruption. Nothing
wrong with throwing away books, but let common sense prevail and people
take them home.
Down with the oligarchy.
j_w wrote 1 day ago:
So if you want them just dumpster dive for them.
sailfast wrote 1 day ago:
Whatâs wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and
searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to
need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your
identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some
form of art âon the wallâ to help one think.
pibaker wrote 19 hours 38 min ago:
Do you actually own "your" ebooks?
From experience, when a college library offers access to an ebook,
what they do is just providing an access token so you can log into
some publisher's website and read it there. The publisher can
theoretically withdraw a book or raise the price and the library will
have no recourse because it doesn't own them.
TFNA wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
> Whatâs wrong with e-books?
This article is about academic libraries. Research in many fields
requires keeping multiple books open in front of you at the same
time, because new research typically starts by synthesizing disparate
previous research. Thatâs a workflow that most people find much
less efficient with ebooks. Your segue into personal book ownership
and impressing people is also not very relevant to the article.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet
Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal
was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The
industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine
preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no
additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and
vault knowledge until copyright laws change, while others are not
constrained to share liberally (Anna's Archive, Z-lib, etc).
If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked
old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind
corporate paywalls.
bentley wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
DRM wouldnât be a problem if it were unambiguously legal to break
it and if copyright durations werenât so ridiculously long. I
have free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from
Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and so on, except for that last
95âyear chunk. There needs to be an appetite for copyright reform
to extend and make permanent DMCA exemptions and to reduce
copyright terms.
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
>>Whatâs wrong with e-books?
>DRM
You're downloading them wrong.
gowld wrote 1 day ago:
> If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently
nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked
behind corporate paywalls.
Yes, that's what funds the creation of culture. If intellectual
property is unprotected, then creators of that property are not
supported.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
Please provide a citation supporting this assertion.
ceayo wrote 1 day ago:
- E-Books smell awful.
- It's fun to collect, to look at what you have.
- You can remember the books, by looking at your shelves.
- You /actually/ own something, instead of some random variable in
Jeff Bezos' database saying you are /allowed to/ read it.
gowld wrote 1 day ago:
No one is stopping you from building your own library.
hcayless wrote 1 day ago:
On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as
we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection
management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets
and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you
expect to happen? Faculty often donât have any idea how the systems
that support them actually function, but things have to actually be
made to work.
anigbrowl wrote 1 day ago:
Honestly, I think part of the problem is that around the time
librarians rebranded themselves as 'information scientists' they got a
bit carried away about how special they were and fell in love with the
power of administration - so much more exciting than merely curating
books selected by other people.
gowld wrote 1 day ago:
Why do those "other people" get a free pass to be "in love with the
power of administration"?
anigbrowl wrote 18 hours 14 min ago:
In academic libraries, because they are experts in their field.
andrewla wrote 1 day ago:
I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says
that there must be some way to preserve them.
My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were
cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had
been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of
the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and
to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these
papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form
it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.
HTML [1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
ForOldHack wrote 1 day ago:
Dijkstra? What is your go-to Dijkstra paper? His papers are like The
short stories of Philip K Dick. Everything seems fine and straight
forward, until you step into another world.
You are indeed privileged. What you have gained by reading them, is
more than an education: It would be a journey, to read them, and your
commentary.
I picked up a science fiction book, in a recycle bin, that for the
most part belonged there, except for one chapter... one short
chapter-and after I read it, the world started to swirl... "Human
language had by this time, become mostly telepathic." Thank you, Joe
Haldeman.
And Thank you Edsger W. Dijkstra.
andrewla wrote 1 day ago:
I think what I appreciate most are the smaller notes, that probably
don't represent a publishable result in any way.
There was one where he describes a problem that he had seen in an
elementary school -- find a fraction between a/b and c/d. Everyone
he talked to had the same basic answer; find a common denominator,
find the midpoint, and if necessary, double the denominator. So 2/3
and 3/4 -> 8/12 and 9/12 -> 16/24 & 18/24 -> 17/24. And to him it
was immediately obvious that a better answer is just (a+c)/(b+d),
which he immediately intuited but then set out to make a better
proof for.
andrewla wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
Dug it up when I got home:
HTML [1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1297.PDF
gammalost wrote 1 day ago:
At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a
lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity
fetisishm.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are
sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get
it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way
comparable to that
clickety_clack wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
Itâs either that, or an extreme conservatism where nothing must
deviate from how it used to be.
joshstrange wrote 1 day ago:
I think thatâs a relatively fair take. Personally I prefer ebooks
or audiobooks mostly because I can put thousands in my
pocket/e-reader and carry it with me and I prefer the experience of
reading a book on my reader over paper.
For me, books are closer to art than functional objects. I have a
wall of bookshelves in my house that I love and Iâm slowly filling
them with my favorite books. I will probably never reread any of them
(Iâll read the ebook version instead) but I like looking at them
and I like being able to loan them out or for them to be a
conversation starter.
It took me a while to be ok with that (treating books as art) but
Iâve made my peace with it. Iâm buy 99% used books from places
like AbeBooks online or Half Price Books locally and I have no
interest in âbooks by the footâ or similar. Itâs more like my
bookshelves are mini-shrines to authors or series that have been
impactful to me.
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
For how many thousands of years were books equivalent to absurd
wealth. Kings might own a book, or several. Libraries were amazing,
but places never seen by the proles and serfs. Thousands of years is
a duration more than long enough to give our species some instinctual
reverence for the object, reverence that is only reinforced by what
we learn from an early age about those. And it's not just the wealth,
at least for some sizable fraction of the population, we come to know
books as things of knowledge and power, so slurring them as mere
commodities is low-handed.
Books are, I think, in some small way, sacred. And I don't want to
associate with people who think otherwise. I don't think you get it
at all.
jubilanti wrote 20 hours 8 min ago:
Then you apparently do not want to associate with the vast majority
of professional librarians, who do not fetishize every individual
physical instantiation of the printed word.
Some books are sacred. But if they all are, then none of them
really are.
the_af wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know whether to call it fetishism, which has a negative
undertone to me.
But I do love physical books. Even unimposing books, I like reading
them but also touching them, their smell, their covers. And for art
books, I think it goes without saying that the experience of the
digital version is markedly different to the physical version.
I love going to a used books store and simply perusing their shelves,
occasionally buying something, and a digital library simply cannot
replicate this.
ciscoriordan wrote 1 day ago:
I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked
them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get
stolen a lot less.
mjmsmith wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
I'd like to believe that real books would get swapped more often
than stolen.
aaronharnly wrote 1 day ago:
Straight out of Gatsby:
A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was
sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with
unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he
wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
âWhat do you think?â he demanded impetuously.
âAbout what?â He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
âAbout that. As a matter of fact you neednât bother to
ascertain. I ascertained. Theyâre real.â
âThe books?â
He nodded.
âAbsolutely real â have pages and everything. I thought
theyâd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, theyâre
absolutely real. Pages and â Here! Lemme show you.â
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and
returned with Volume One of the âStoddard Lectures.â
âSee!â he cried triumphantly. âItâs a bona-fide piece of
printed matter. It fooled me. This fellaâs a regular Belasco.
Itâs a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to
stop, too â didnât cut the pages. But what do you want? What do
you expect?â
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf,
muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was
liable to collapse.
el_io wrote 1 day ago:
What is even a fake book? Like it has a nice cover and nothing
inside?
tecleandor wrote 1 day ago:
Yep, think movie props or fake computer or books in an IKEA or
other furniture store. Maybe a whole shelf with a cardboard
structure simulating the spines of a bunch of books, but all
empty inside.
littlekey wrote 1 day ago:
Small nitpick but the books in IKEA are all real, and written
in Swedish :).
ciscoriordan wrote 1 day ago:
Exactly. Basically a cardboard shell with realistic covers.
varun_ch wrote 1 day ago:
I found out recently that you can just buy books. There's
businesses who sell books. Not any specific book, but just books to
fill shelves to decorate rooms. You can even buy colour coordinated
books.
HTML [1]: https://booksbythefoot.com/
ungreased0675 wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
While this is a fantastic service for interior decorators, I find
the concept of using books as just decorations grotesque.
asdff wrote 23 hours 43 min ago:
Reversed is so crazy.
tecleandor wrote 1 day ago:
Also Strand (in NYC) has that service. You can by them by the
foot based on color, style, theme...
HTML [1]: https://www.strandbooks.com/books-by-the-foot/color.html
kristjansson wrote 1 day ago:
> the shelves were being cleared to make spaceânot for more books but
for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them
feature books
Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the
library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and
collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The
collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to
the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.
nitwit005 wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
Yep, also meeting rooms for various clubs. My university genuinely
had a wine tasting club that met in the library.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
Even going back decades, I recall major US university libraries
served a dual function as having books, reference librarians, and
serving as study and group work spaces. Maybe it's changed a bit but
it's not new.
kristjansson wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
Dual use is definitely not a new thing; sacrificing the ostensible
primary use for the secondary seems to raise the author's ire (and
mine).
SMV279438 wrote 1 day ago:
I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound
magazines just for some browsing.
Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound
magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look
through them.
But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with
completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and
the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.
I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these,
online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and
have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old
magazines.
goldfishgold wrote 15 hours 45 min ago:
Utah Valley University?
dredmorbius wrote 22 hours 4 min ago:
I had the experience at uni in the 1980s of seeing the film The Last
Emperor, which at one point includes a bit where a Time Magazine
photographer is present. I realised that this probably meant that
Time had run an item on the (then newly-crowned Japanese puppet)
emperor Puyi of Manchukuo (occupied China).
So I headed to the campus library, serials room, which had bound
volumes of Time along with many other publications, and shelf-scanned
the appropriate date ranges around 1934 until I found the edition
with the story. Read that, which was insightful (a question I'd had
was whether or not Puyi was seen at the time as a puppet, and yes, he
very much was).
I am fearful that this experience could not be replicated today, and
that those stacks may well have been cleared.
mncharity wrote 1 day ago:
Years ago I did an exploratory UX spike, an attempt to make history
more tangible, by giving each day a dot (so a couple of centuries fit
on a screen), with the dots providing, among other things, scans of
that day's newspapers and magazines. Nice for browsing/surfing
history. Part of not pursuing it further, was newspapers - and
historically there were many many more newspapers per region, let
alone per person - newspapers were already mostly paywalled, and
becoming less available with time. Even libraries which did their own
scanning of archived local papers, would grow tired of support, and
turn them over for paywalling. My understanding was there was little
money in it, but all it takes is enough to scatter moats everywhere,
to make a terrain inaccessible to broad access.
andrewla wrote 1 day ago:
I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and
when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I
could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's
basement where they remain to this day.
Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves
in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day.
Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing
experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a
real way by not giving them access to this.
asdff wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
Never too late to go back and start up a physical library.
Walf wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items
available on inter-library loan.
I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even
if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
I agree to some degree. But I'd also note that some of the biggest
libraries don't have open stacks.
LaGrange wrote 1 day ago:
Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books.
Itâs one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism
manifests.
ceayo wrote 1 day ago:
Without books, what books are they going to read?
LaGrange wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Other paper books. Or the same books but electronic or reprinted
when the demand is higher. Just not the exact same pieces of highly
fetishized dead wood.
bentley wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
Other books that are checked out often enough to justify the
library keeping them.
SauntSolaire wrote 1 day ago:
E-books supposedly, since the parent explicitly specified paper
books.
bastawhiz wrote 1 day ago:
My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't
been checked out in years, and there's another library in the
interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason
to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a
few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books
that nobody is checking out in the first place.
I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement
was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading
anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably
related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would
see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still
get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county
network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard
of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.
goldfishgold wrote 15 hours 49 min ago:
Do you keep track of what was deaccessioned and compare that against
ILL requests? Otherwise how would you know, unless you happen to
remember all the books that have been disposed of?
com2kid wrote 16 hours 19 min ago:
I live in Seattle and we have a fairly large library system.
They have none of the fraggle rock books. A once huge series, now
gone.
Same for the Mr Men series. Just may as well not exist.
My son very much enjoys my old fraggle rock books, but my library
system apparently threw all of their copies away years ago.
rahimnathwani wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
"If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days"
That means two trips to the library. And it means you can't use the
book that same day. This is fine for fiction, but not if you want a
book because you're going to study it to aid your learning or your
work.
If it's fine for a book to arrive in a few days why have a library
with publicly browsable shelves at all?
lgvld wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
Anyone remember this story about two librarians (hackers?) accused of
creating fake borrowers in order to prevent books from being weed
out?
HTML [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/06/florida-librar...
phendrenad2 wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
I think librarians tend to become creatures-that-shovel-books.
Librarians come to think of books as this sort of continuum, an ooze
that they just pipe from one stack to another. Housing the books and
following the proper procedures becomes the important thing, not the
words on the pages.
But that's completely the wrong attitude. Books are NOT all created
equal. A schlocky romance novel is not equivalent to a book by
Kierkegaard, or Vonnegut, or Plath, despite the fact that they are
just a bunch of leaves between bindings with an ISBN stamped on the
back.
So it's telling when the top comment on a story about professors
fighting to save books from being carelessly thrown away is that
there exists a basement full of romance novels. The narrator is
faulty in this story.
asdff wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
It seems like they just don't really plan inventory in a logical way
but in a sort of rigid first in first out way. For example I just
checked out a recent addition of a classical book, one of those
original classical translations that were reprinted in the 2010s with
some new forward I will skip over as the only thing different than
the 1990 edition, or the 1960 edition for that matter.
The library had probably 30 copies of this edition, most all sitting
on shelves, while maybe 1 or 2 each of all other older editions. I'm
guessing solely because this edition is "new" therefore they ordered
a case of these books from the publisher when they came out whether
there was demand for it or not, and the quantities of the older
editions are much more likely to be matched to true demand of this
book.
And eventually, they will have to destroy what probably 29 copies of
this book in some years time.
Seems kind of stupid right? Why order such an excess of books?
Then I also wonder if they could sunset these quantities better.
Rather than destroy the excess copy after I return it, maybe just let
me keep it?
throwaway173738 wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
> Rather than destroy the excess copy after I return it, maybe just
let me keep it?
This is pretty much what they do with childrenâs board books.
Toddlers pretty much wreck any book you give them. But the library
wants kids to learn to read. So they check them out and then they
accept them back in whatever condition, no fees.
reaperducer wrote 1 day ago:
and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has
a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can
request a book and have it arrive in a few days
I've done ILL in three major cities. The shortest time it took to
get the books requested was 14 days. Some have taken over 60.
bombcar wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
Thereâs different levels of interlibrary loan - around here all
the little local libraries can loan from each other in a matter of
days (they ship to a central location each day). But they can also
pull from a much wider distribution via media mail if needed.
bastawhiz wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
You can request a book from another library that's already checked
out in some cases, which means you have to wait for it to be
returned first. In my experience, a week is usually the norm.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
That seems like a very reasonable timeframe for a physical book.
Certainly used to take longer than that to special-order something.
dredmorbius wrote 22 hours 32 min ago:
In 1897 the US Library of Congress moved off-site from the
Capitol building to an adjacent property. A key concern of its
patronage (Congress itself) was how long it would take to
retrieve books from this remote location.
The annual Librarian's letter details the results: an
unannounced test of five arbitrarily-selected works was made via
pneumatic tube (later supplemented with a telephone), and the
requested works arrived within 10m5s, 8m11s, 10m, and with the
longest delay, 12 minutes from receipt of the request.
See p. 7 of the annual Librarian's Report: < [1] >.
One would hope that 2026 technolgies would be capable of results
within at least the same order of magnitude, even at a greater
physical separation.
One of my tremendous disappointments of today's Internet is the
haste with which it delivers drek, but the reluctance with which
it provides useful information, often for utterly outdated
concerns with copyright. I'll note that HathiTrust itself, here
the source of what was originally a public-domain US government
publication, well outside any possible extant of copyright, still
only permits one-page-at-a-time downloading of the original
document.
HTML [1]: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.3901503673504...
crote wrote 1 day ago:
A big problem with accessibility is that interlibrary loan is awful
for browsing.
I rarely go to a library to loan a specific work - I go there to find
a work. This means going through dozens of potentially-relevant
titles, taking them off the shelf, quickly browsing through them, and
taking the one or two best ones home. This entire workflow becomes
impossible if the book isn't readily available.
A book hidden in a box in the basement, or which arrives after only a
few days, might as well not exist at all. I'm simply not going to
scroll through a list, order several dozen books solely by their
title alone, and come back a few days later (if this is even allowed
at all): it's just not worth my time.
The whole "we keep a copy in a central archive" approach only works
for historical purposes, not for actually making it available for
reading. If you do that you have to also make digital scans trivially
available for browsing - and in practice that rarely happens!
Tangurena2 wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
Whenever I am attending university, or live near one, I try to walk
every aisle and every shelf at least once per year. Maybe things
are much better these days, but all too often I would find books
that were not in the card catalog (or cataloged incorrectly). The
"adjacent shelf" method of research was one secret that grad
students tended to learn.
Cycl0ps wrote 1 day ago:
You're browsing for whatever piques your interest, and the library
wants to curate the collection based on what people are interested
in. The books that collect interest get placed on the shelves and
the ones that don't get archived. If it's in the archive it
probably wouldn't have interested you.
sapphicsnail wrote 19 hours 30 min ago:
You say that but the author mentioned On Grammatology getting
purged. That's a pretty important and influential book. It's a
very difficult read which probably contributes to it not being
checked out very often and it should definitely stay there.
elictronic wrote 1 day ago:
Expecting libraries to maintain digital scans of every book they
have had or anything to that effect is a little laughable. These
organizations do more for communities with less money and you
expect them do now navigate the legal and ethical quagmire of
digital ownership because you can't handle knowledge and books
becoming less valuable with time.
If you are a software dev, go volunteer at a library and offer up
your time to do this. Do something for your community, do
something for yourself.
bigbadfeline wrote 1 day ago:
> If you are a software dev, go volunteer at a library and offer
up your time to do this.
You misunderstand the environment, "offering" doesn't work if the
library haven't asked for help, in that case you're just ignored.
You see, whatever you do for them would require participation and
at least some effort on their side.
Some other organization could help here, but going to the library
and begging them to let you help them is a non starter.
Blackthorn wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
Public libraries are public institutions and are controlled by
towns and counties, in a few different common ways. To affect
change in the town or county's library, you can participate in
that process.
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
>My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't
been checked out in years, and there's another library in the
interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical
reason to keep another copy.
These libraries do not coordinate the deaccessioning. If it ever gets
down to 2 copies, there's a non-zero chance that they will
deaccession their copies simultaneously, and then there are none.
You worked for a library. Did they ever check first to make sure some
other library had a copy? Did they warn that other library "we're
getting rid of ours, please don't get rid of yours"?
bastawhiz wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
> Did they ever check first to make sure some other library had a
copy? Did they warn that other library "we're getting rid of ours,
please don't get rid of yours"?
Yes. They have a shared catalog. All of this is coordinated. It's
literally the whole point of being a librarian.
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
>They have a shared catalog.
Yes. I have my nose in it constantly. It's a fallacy to ascribe
more coordination to this than actually exists. What mechanism is
it that you think exists that would sound the red alert when the
last library (or even the second to last) is about to get rid of
the very last copy?
jubilanti wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
> What mechanism is it that you think exists that would sound
the red alert when the last library (or even the second to
last) is about to get rid of the very last copy?
Doesn't need much coordination. Before getting rid of a book,
search for it in that shared catalog you allegedly have your
nose in constantly. If you're the last or second to last copy,
then you know. Unless two libraries are independently doing
this at the exact same time.
ciscoriordan wrote 1 day ago:
Youâre so wrong.
ââI think some faculty worry
that everyone is going to discard
willy nilly and then before you
know it there wonât be anything
left,â Walker said. âNo, libraries
have gotten together, research libraries and others, and joined a
consortium called LOCKSS â Lots
of Copies Keep Stuff Safe â and
people have agreements like Harvard is the place that will always
keep a print copy of x. And thereâs
multiple ones of all of it. So thereâs backup in case Harvard
gets blown
away by a norâeaster or something.ââ
HTML [1]: https://dakotastudent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Apr-1...
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
The Internet Archive accepts media they do not have on hand yet.
Resources: [1] [2] [3]
HTML [1]: https://archive.org/want/?mode=donation_book
HTML [2]: https://help.archive.org/help/does-the-internet-archive-have...
HTML [3]: https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a...
HTML [4]: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
timcobb wrote 1 day ago:
this sounds a bit different than a university library situation
ForOldHack wrote 1 day ago:
I was walking down the street, and I saw a art/documentary style
picture of a book seller, wearing a Fez, it seemed interesting, so I
took a picture of it, and later fawned on it... until I realized that
his books were on display, so I rotated the picture, and scanned the
titles. There were three Greek tarot decks, which were interesting,
and a book, that was about an old technology. I went to the library
to see where I could check it out. No were in the city library, no
where in the State University or State colleges, no where in the
county collection... and then the librarian/Super-genius, suggested
scanning the local library database, and found the book, in a small
library, in the far corner of the state, and I filled out a form to
request a two week loan... but two days to get here, and two days
return, I would have the book for 10 solid days.
When I got it, I read through it, solid for three days. Wow. Stunning
look at a technology in its infancy.
The name of the Bookseller was Luma Kunda. Thank you Mr Kunda. I
later learned from someone at the nearby bus stop, that Mr Kunda
possessed an eidetic memory.
I would have loved to hear him tell stories about what he saw in the
tarot cards.
asdff wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
You could have renewed that book though right? I haven't actually
ever done an interlibrary loan but for "in network" books seems I
can continue renewing them indefinitely until the end of time.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
If you have a list of ISBNs (in a github gist, pastebin, or
similar), I am happy to purchase any the Internet Archive does not
yet have in their collection for long term preservation and
eventual lending. Thank you for sharing.
anigbrowl wrote 1 day ago:
Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody
was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books
that probably related to kids from a previous generation more.
This is hardly comparable to difficult philosophy books as mentioned
in the article, though. To my mind, the poin of libraries is to house
and make accessible difficult or challenging books that might not
necessarily be popular. I was shocked when I first visited an
American library and found large numbers of mass-market paperbacks
and magazines. When I say 'large numbers' I mean 10 or 20 copies of
books by Oprah or other celebrity authors. Librarians would have it
that they're serving the community by making these books available in
the library around the same time they're available in bookstores,
ignoring the fact that once the publisher's marketing drive is over
all those extra copies are going to be surplus. I do not understand
why you would buy 20 copies of one book when you could have it and 19
other books.
ungreased0675 wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
Itâs very simple: Because people go to the library looking for
those books. If the library consistently doesnât have the books
people went there for, they stop going. If people stop going to the
library, it eventually gets shut down.
bastawhiz wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
My local library wasn't meant for academics, but the problem is
exactly the same. In fact, I'd expect a library with those kinds of
books to be more amenable to trimming the collection: you often
don't have a romance novel in mind, you browse for one that piques
your interest. I'd be surprised if anyone was actively browsing
shelves for philosophy books that seemed fun. That's the sort of
stuff you go to the card catalog for.
> I do not understand why you would buy 20 copies of one book when
you could have it and 19 other books.
Easy answer. Libraries know what their clients will check out.
Often, because books are requested. If fifty people wait-listed the
last big Dan Brown book, the library buys enough so that those
people aren't waiting months to get their turn.
And yes, it's frustrating for librarians. Nobody likes buying lots
of books that are not especially good. But that's literally the
whole point of the library. Providing access to books that people
actually want to read.
Amezarak wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
That actually is not at all why most American libraries were
founded. They were very explicit about this and it was not so
people would have fun books to read.
If we needed public entertainment centers, then let's be clear
what they are and advertise them as such. Personally I have no
interest in the public funding of entertainment.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
The point of libraries is to help people access the books they
want. If someone wants Oprah's book then why should the library not
help them access it? If a lot of people want it, then why should
the library not stock many copies so that more those people can
access it? They don't exist to gatekeep books and ensure people
read whatever you think are the right kind of books.
anigbrowl wrote 18 hours 16 min ago:
If a lot of people want it, it will be widely available through
other channels. If you buy too many copies, you end up with what
we see in many libraries, multiple copies of last/previous years'
flavors-of-the-month that nobody cares about any more. Great for
publishers who want to maximize library sales at $80/unit, not so
great for readers who want a wider selections of books to choose
from.
bashmelek wrote 1 day ago:
I have a bit of a problem with the all or nothing framing this
discourse usually has. I think that libraries should make an
effort to stock evergreen classics in addition to the recent,
hot, and in demand. The new ones will be checked out a lot, then
fall off, and then the library eventually gets a new batch of new
hits.
They do serve a lot of people with this method, but am a
different cohort. If a library is to serve a diverse group of
people it should also remember book snobs like me. When I visit
my local library it is as if anything remotely classic is hidden
in a secret area, you canât find hardly any of them.
bombcar wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
The libraries actually do this, even if itâs not entirely
visible or advertised- most librarians are rabid book-lovers
and would love nothing more than to stock great books and
similar.
They just provide cover with the DVDs and the pulp.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
I totally agree. People who want evergreen classics count too,
and the library should do its best to ensure they can get the
books they want as well. They shouldn't stock nothing but
bestsellers, any more than they should stock no bestsellers at
all.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
And, with the Internet (e.g. Gutenberg), evergreen classics
are less of an issue. Speaking for myself, I've gotten rid of
most of my books in the public domain unless they have other
characteristics like illustrations that make me want to hold
onto them.
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
Probably because there is demand. Could be that there was very deep
waiting list at some point. Or there has been deep waiting list for
specific author before. Fulfilling these demands does require
multiple copies or it could take years for people to get popular
book.
anigbrowl wrote 1 day ago:
Sorry, I don't think popularity should be a factor in library
decision-making. Extremely popular books driven by massive
marketing campaigns predictably translate into the same book
being available for only a few dollars months later. This all
sounds like it's driven much more by the needs of publishers than
library users; consider that the more reduced the selection, the
fewer people will come to use the library because they can't find
enough interesting material to read.
My local Half-Price Books (a second-hand bookstore chain) has a
vastly better selection than my local library.
dredmorbius wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
Yours seems to be an unpopular opinion. Perhaps you could
partner with Bertrand Russell: < [1] >.
I'm also reminded by an observation of the late Robert K.
Merton, on latent vs. manifest functions. Originally coined in
the context of sociology, but far more broadly applicable. In
discussing these, Merton makes the perceptive observation that
because latent functions are not immediately apparent, obvious,
or significant, they represent a greater increment of knowledge
and understanding than manifest functions, which are obvious,
evident, easily understood and communicated, etc.
Popular works, or opinions, tend to be more accessible, yes.
But they are also frequently a lower increment of knowledge or
utility.
I too am pained by book and other information collections which
pander to easy accessibility at a cost to insight and
significance. That isn't to say that libraries should discount
popularity at all, but I cringe when it seems to be the primary
consideration.
By extension, other mass-context systems (markets, mass media,
etc.) also tend toward minimum viable standards (often
mis-stated as "least common denominator", problematic in
several ways), and discount both long-term (non-obvious,
non-apparent) benefits and costs.
HTML [1]: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13524206M/Unpopular_es...
jubilanti wrote 1 day ago:
> I don't think popularity should be a factor in library
decision-making.
How dare librarians... give the people the books they want to
read???
anigbrowl wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
Well, I should have said the overriding factor, but my
reasoning is that a lot of what appears to be 'popularity' is
just the result of marketing campaigns by publishers, as
opposed to the sort of enduring popularity that comes from
being loved by readers (which can't be determined until some
time after a book's release).
That said, I would still prioritize variety over pure
popularity. For example, I can see a library having 2 or 3
copies of all the Harry Potter books because people keep
checking them out, but I don't think they need 10 copies.
jubilanti wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
And your sense of what books are truly quality is in no way
impacted by "marketing" to you? Let me guess, are you one
of those people who thinks that ads work on other people,
but not them?
Your idea of what makes a book good or bad is as much
influenced by the marketing you are exposed to. You're just
subjected to a different kind of marketing than the general
public.
phil21 wrote 1 day ago:
This is a great way to lose what's left of public support for
libraries. Going (more?) elitist is really not the way to go
here. Your average person should be able to find utility in a
library.
University libraries of course might be a good exception to
this rule. But your local public library should be a way to
make reading accessible to the average middle to lower class
family. And that means providing the materials they want to
read - not what you think they should.
It's always going to be a balance for librarians. They don't
get to operate in ivory towers disconnected from those local
taxpayers whom fund them.
anigbrowl wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
Utility is in having a big selection of books. If a large
chunk of the library is just multiple copies of previously
popular books, then you are cutting people off from discover
the range of books that are available. I would never have
found authors like Stanislaw Lem or or Robert Heinlein as a
teenager if it hadn't been for the library; the science
fiction sections in bookstores at the time were clogged with
movie adaptation novellas and mostly forgettable
trilogies/franchise works.
As a library-funding taxpayer myself, I find it very
depressing that the selection in my local libraries is so
lacking. Hence my remark about the vast superiority of
second-hand bookstores for just about any topic.
sapphicsnail wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
> But your local public library should be a way to make
reading accessible to the average middle to lower class
family. And that means providing the materials they want to
read - not what you think they should.
It's pretty classicist to assume that only rich people are
reading those kinds of books. I have plenty of friends who
struggle to pay rent who read dense stuff like philosophy,
lit. theory, etc. This whole David Brooks style paternalism
drives me crazy.
Amezarak wrote 21 hours 10 min ago:
> This is a great way to lose what's left of public support
for libraries. Going (more?) elitist is really not the way to
go here.
Why should I support a public entertainment center? The
original American libraries were created to make valuable and
educational works accessible to the public, not pulp. Library
systems all over the country have discarded most of this
stuff in favor of political, romance, mysteries and kids
books. Abandoning their original mission is exactly why their
public support has collapsed. Nobody cares about a place for
homeless people to browse the Internet or to check out video
games and movies.
> But your local public library should be a way to make
reading accessible to the average middle to lower class
family.
"Reading" is already maximally accessible, nobody needs a
library to do this. Kids are reading reams and reams of web
fiction. If anything, the increasingly low quality of library
fare is related to the poor reading level of Americans
generally - children's books have become especially
atrocious, but even pulp mystery fiction is written on a very
low reading level. âWe have to get them to READâ is a
completely pointless and meaningless goal if the public
benefit is to keep up romance fiction publisher profits.
anigbrowl wrote 18 hours 29 min ago:
Speaking of children's books being atrocious, more and more
people are turning up examples of AI-generated books in
libraries. I know Librarians aim to screen out this sort of
stuff but they seem to be missing the mark. Part of the
problem is that some publishers appear to mix AI stuff into
their catalogs and some libraries are just buying based on
the cover and summary text. [1]
HTML [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1rnjx1e/i...
HTML [2]: https://www.governing.com/artificial-intelligence/...
kzrdude wrote 1 day ago:
I fear that the availability of e-books will lead to more libraries
getting rid of their last copy, not just the penultimate one.
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine which
one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving such books
around on request does not exceed that of storage.
Given the number of books I've been unable to find when I wanted them
save in the Library of Congress (which won't loan, necessitating a
trip to DC, or finding and purchasing my own copy), and the number of
times my ILL requests have been turned down, a last copy per system
mechanism seems the best for preserving access.
bastawhiz wrote 23 hours 43 min ago:
> That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine
which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving
such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.
This is actually a mostly-solved problem in many cases. Many
librarians have great SQL skills (or at least the ones I've met)
and can query this easily. Most regional library systems have a
centralized catalog. And the cost of moving books on demand is
fixed: a van with one book and a van with fifty books costs the
same to drive between branches.
Most colleges and universities have agreements with each other for
exactly these systems and they're actively used. My partner
considered completing his U Chicago PhD from San Francisco by way
of the Stanford library.
WillAdams wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
You need to move those skills and agreements down to the smaller
regional level.
There have been numerous cases where I checked out a book, and
later went to refer to it again and it was not just no longer in
the stacks, but not available in the system.
rdmond wrote 1 day ago:
> That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine
which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving
such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.
Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and NYPL coordinate on exactly
this
HTML [1]: https://recap.princeton.edu/
calvinmorrison wrote 1 day ago:
And if you're lucky, your library may do frequent book sales!
HTML [1]: https://www.bapl.org/book-sales/
fhdkweig wrote 1 day ago:
40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books
that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp
"discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile
that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books
were headed for the landfill.
I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and
radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the
neutrino and particle physics.
Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new
books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only
ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.
pfdietz wrote 1 day ago:
In the town where I live, surplus books from the library, and
donated books, are sold twice a year over several weekends. As
time goes on at these events the price drops, until on the last day
it's $1 for a paper grocery bag full. Those that remain go into a
dumpster for pulping and recycling.
It's quite an event with long lines to get in and is loved by all.
The money raised is used to buy more books for the library.
HTML [1]: https://booksale.org/
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, this part of the article made me sad:
> a state universityâs property, even if itâs been deemed
trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals.
What a waste! Sure, allowing something like this could (and
probably would) be abused, but I think the waste is worse.
I'm glad your middle school was able to do what they did!
themaninthedark wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
They don't have surplus sales?
I know the universe I went to did. Price it all at a penny each.
etempleton wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
Even libraries that go to the trouble of doing this throw away
probably a thousand books for every one they can sell.
pfdietz wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
That depends on the structure and scale of the sale. Our
local library sells most of the books at the biannual sales.
Granted, many of those sell for very little; prices decline
over several weeks so the things discarded wouldn't sell even
for pennies.
fhn wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
they do and it's usually an auction but at a penny each is not
worth the time to even post it. Also, not many people are
buying old books unless they are collectibles. So more than
just books go straight into the dump.
eutropia wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if they could have transferred it to a separate
nonprofit, and then that nonprofit has no restrictions on whom it
is transferred or sold to?
e15ctr0n wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
Many libraries have a Friends organization that receives books
culled from the library's collections. [1] The Friends are a
separate nonprofit from the library, usually run by volunteers.
They can also accept donations from the public, keeping books
out of dumpsters. They organize regular book sales which are
generally popular with the reading public. [2] If you think
that books should be kept out of the landfill or the shredder,
please consider starting a Friends group for your local
library. [3] National Friends of Libraries Week is usually the
third week of October every year.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Libraries
HTML [2]: https://action.everylibrary.org/from_book_sales_to_big...
HTML [3]: https://www.ala.org/united/friends
HTML [4]: https://www.ala.org/united/events_conferences/folweek
cwmoore wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
One trick state legislatures hate!
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
My local town library has a book sale every fall and you can take
away a paper bag of books for $10. It's not practical for every
small library, in particular, to hold onto every book forever.
kzrdude wrote 1 day ago:
I picked up a fun university library discard the other day (month).
This one is about Lunar geology. The concept of the book is so
inspiring to me: "it's 1975, we brought home a lot of samples from
the moon now; so what did we learn". It was fun to look through
that one - a snapshot of a very exciting time.
(Taylor, Lunar Science: A post-Apollo view)
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
That is what deep basement storage is for.
A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a
first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one
can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark:
>What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of
a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'
WalterBright wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
> That is what deep basement storage is for.
That's what scanned books are for. Didn't google already scan
them all? And then the book publishers shut that down?
ForOldHack wrote 1 day ago:
This is a brilliant observation, in regards to the first
edition's depiction of Gollum.
In the first edition, he was depicted as a large creature, and
Tolkien was upset about it, and in the second edition, changed
the description to small.
This information was gathered by a rare book seller who's videos
I find immensely interesting.
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
That is what big national central libraries are for. Hopefully
government funded libraries actually properly archiving
everything printed in the country.
fhdkweig wrote 1 day ago:
Schools in poor towns don't have multiple levels or basements or
even extra storage rooms. What you see is all you get.
If there is enough space to have a room full of books, it would
be better used as a publicly accessible set of stacks. The only
real reason to have a librarian-only room is for books that are
rare and valuable.
AtlasBarfed wrote 1 day ago:
Society is completely overloaded with a vast surplus of
commercial property. Something can be done
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
As I implied elsethread, the solution for that is better
funding.
Someone needs to take up Carnegie's mantle and finish the job
which he began.
webnrrd2k wrote 1 day ago:
What's stopping you?
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, there are always solutions, and many of them usually
involve more money. But that money usually doesn't just
magically appear, even with plenty of Carnegie-types these
days looking to whitewash their reputations through
philanthropy. The money often is the problem that needs to
be solved, and there's just no source for those funds.
gowld wrote 1 day ago:
Someone can ask for a copy in the mail, cheaper than
pre-emptively printing and storing thousands of copies of
every version of every book.
HTML [1]: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ref_=...
bluGill wrote 1 day ago:
Most books are not worth saving.
S_Bear wrote 1 day ago:
I used to work in a bookstore, and I've been working in
libraries almost my entire career. Most books have no
value. I've probably thrown out a million books in my life;
most of them have been diet books, cook books, and
political biographies.
My current library is around 2000 square feet and I acquire
around 1000 books a year, so I have to toss around 1000
books a year, because they're made of matter and take up
space.
duskwuff wrote 17 min ago:
It's a bit less of a thing than it used to be, but
disposable books on technology were a thing for quite a
while too. Think titles like "iPhone 6 for Dummies",
"Learn Flash in 24 Hours", or "Windows 8 for Seniors" -
there are a lot of books which were written (usually on
the cheap) for a specific audience at a specific time,
and which have no enduring value.
Also along these lines: test prep and study guide books.
Same deal really.
bombcar wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
Goodwill is a much more accurate slice of âwhat is
publishedâ than any library is.
jerf wrote 1 day ago:
You need a limiting principle or there is no limit to the
"better funding" you're asking for until you have a Library
of Congress in every small town in America, to no positive
effect.
What's the limiting principle you propose? It has to be
something real libraries and library funding sources can take
action on, because they have to take real-world actions on
them. So this is not a time for aspirational speeches or
vague exhortations to "do more", which is the exact opposite
of a limiting principle anyhow. What is "enough"?
throwaway173738 wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
> to no positive effect.
This is a REALLY bold assumption youâre making here, and
frankly until weâve tried it I donât think you can
argue that it has no positive effect to put tons of books
in every small town everywhere.
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
The limiting principle should be that for a given ILL
region/system, there is at least one copy of each
book/edition which entered that system which can be loaned
out.
As I noted, it's a pain for me to have to drive down to DC
to get access to a book which _used_ to be in the local
library system, but isn't anymore, or to purchase my own
copy (which wasn't previously necessary).
roysting wrote 1 day ago:
Donât worry everyone, the Ministry of Truth will make sure we know
what we need to know.
roysting wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
The Minions of the Ministry clearly do not approve.
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
A given library system should have a "last copy" policy, and should
keep at least one copy of each book which has been added to their
collection --- any which can't afford that need more funding.
>Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money
will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert
When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia
where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the
basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would
remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my
purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its
contents.
Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a
neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul.
>A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect)
--- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton
c.f.,
>No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant
company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet
Beecher Stowe
ciscoriordan wrote 1 day ago:
Sensationalism. That's routine collection management.
Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz
Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old
book:
HTML [1]: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-library-...
TFNA wrote 1 day ago:
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that
personâs underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In
my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed
stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not
dumpstered.
Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space
limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future
that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldnât yet be
called routine. Objecting to this trend is still very much
appropriate.
michaelt wrote 1 day ago:
> Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space
limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future
that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldnât yet
be called routine.
20 years ago when I was in university, this trend was already
picking up steam.
First they removed the historical newspaper microfilms (replaced
with an online archive which could be searched)
Then the academic journals went online, allowing desk-bound
academics to access them online.
Then the paper journals they had on the shelves got older and
older, and the library became less and less a place of research,
more and more a collection of textbooks for undergraduates and a
place for quiet study.
And once the library decided to focus on being a study space,
whiteboards and areas for study groups and laptop users became the
order of the day. Smart whiteboards and projectors too, this being
20 years ago.
canjobear wrote 1 day ago:
Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a
while. See
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
ciscoriordan wrote 1 day ago:
You're confusing the other library in the article with the
(unnamed) one mentioned in the title, the Chester Fritz Library.
TFNA wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting to see the talk of âF-pattern scrolling through
electronic publicationsâ, which was new to me.
As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I
donât think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader
is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping
multiple pages open at once, but I donât find myself skimming the way
I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.
beej71 wrote 1 day ago:
Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like
anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone,
and my computer screen.
If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim
if it were printed, too.
crtasm wrote 1 day ago:
any system with pages you "turn" certainly feels very different to
reading a webpage (or PDF) with free vertical scrolling
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