Why are libraries destroying books? (2002)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sending books to be pulped is always sad, but the truth is that there are just too many books. A researcher doesn't gain a great deal of benefit from seeing an original paper copy; in most cases, they'd prefer a digital copy. Preserving paper is inherently more expensive than preserving microfiche or digital scans. Librarians love books, that's why they became librarians, but sometimes it's just not possible to justify the shelf space for something that nobody is ever likely to read.
The word "free" eliminates an irrational roadblock (13c is basically free but still offers a hurdle) and if one person reads something interesting as a result, then it's a win.
Also, they could box them up and offer each box off for 25c, thus offloading the responsibility of discarding the books onto individuals and preserving the notion of a library as a sanctuary for books.
The local library where I grew up tried this. It also doesn't really solve the problem of too many books. They would first put up surplus/old books for sale for a quarter or less, and twice a year would hold an event where they put the stock outside on tables and people could just take them for free. They were always left with tons of books even after all that.
It's sad to see books destroyed but they literally can't give them all away, and each building only has so much space.
Often it's not obsolete books that are destroyed, where there might be 1,000 other copies out there, but one-of-a-kind archival records:
>> The core of the book recounts Baker's attempt, in 1999, to persuade the British Library not to junk more than 2,000 bound volumes of American newspapers - the last remaining copies in the world - including a complete run of the Chicago Tribune from 1888 to 1958 and hundreds of editions of Joseph Pulitzer's ground-breaking colour broadsheet of the 1890s, the New York World.
> A researcher doesn't gain a great deal of benefit from seeing an original paper copy; in most cases, they'd prefer a digital copy. Preserving paper is inherently more expensive than preserving microfiche or digital scans.
Maybe now, but preservation isn't about now, it's about the distant future. Paper is one of the few storage mediums that has proven longevity and also requires no special reading hardware. Microfiche is probably OK (there was an article recently that stated it could lat 500 years), but I'd dispute strongly that "preserving paper is inherently more expensive than preserving ... digital scans." Digital data requires massive amounts of infrastructure to be usable (hardware, software, storage media, and reading hardware), and the rapid pace of change of that infrastructure means that enormous, continuous efforts must be made to keep it readable in the future. Seal a newspaper up in a wall and it'll still be readable in 100 years. If you stop your digital preservation efforts for that long, you've lost everything.
It's kind of the same with pictures. Most of the people I know have thousands of pictures on their phone - most of which they will never, ever look through.
But also don't neglect the long term costs of setting aside thousands of square feet, usually in an expensive metropolis, for storage.
I mean, I know as a programmer it wouldn't be a ton of effort to store a few terabytes on a local machine, make offsite backups, and write a program every 10 years to re-jigger the technology. Renting out an extra bedroom which I would fill with library shelves would be far more expensive.
Digital archives get duplicated (unless the owner jealously hides it away). Duplication is the most resistant means of longevity.
Personally, I would say even local lending libraries have a part to play in preservation. They may have copies of local periodicals that exist nowhere else. They should at least do some due diligence with other, more common, items to make sure they don't discard anything that's potentially now unique or rare (e.g. a collection of unfashionable midcentury children's books that all libraries decided to purge around the same time). Stuff like that should be kept in an out of the way warehouse or something.
A local lending library shouldn't have to keep seldom used books in easily accessible circulation, but I feel there should be other options besides that, pulping, and digitization.
How can you verify that there were no changes made during the scanning process? This is one reason I would think that a researcher would prefer a hard copy and not digital.
I understand the value of storing the information, but the paper medium itself doesn't typically hold value to me. Is there value in preserving an idiosyncratic style of bound book? Absolutely. Preserving a literal ton of regular old newspapers? Not so much. Let's digitize em and give the libraries room to further modernize so that they can stay relevant.
Local libraries should be serving their community, and that involves making hard choices about spending their existing floor and storage space to make the most useful content available.
The moment you tap on libraries, every employee at the library goes on facebook and calls moms to revolt.
Its emotion driven, and as a result a political tool.
Of course, that's not the point of the article, the article's point is that they recorded it on microfilm and now that's going bad, too. The headline here is awful, as any library worker will tell you libraries destroy books all the time for really good reasons.
Or hasn't been checked out in years, or is grossly outdated then why waste physical space to preserve it. Sure, some patrons might find novelty in there being a book that mentions all 48 states of the U.S. bbbbuutttt there's 50 now. Or 'hey we've got 12 copies of The Da Vinci Code, no one has checked it out in 3 months... perhaps we should get rid of 11 of them'.
In a private collection, sure. In a library, ehhhhh a public library's mission isn't to preserve a given work in perpetuity.
Also in my experience libraries will attempt to sell the books first at fairly regular sales (I used to horde allowance and paper route money to go buy tons of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks when I was a kid for 10-50 cents a pop, it's how I discovered Stephen R. Donaldson and the Thomas Covenant books, I thought the paperback cover of Lord Foul's Bane looked evil and creepy. How I discovered Heinlein too) then only throw away what is truly damaged or didn't sell to make space for newer texts.
Future historical value is hard to predict.
Good example:
>Worse is the implication is that if something is not "sufficiently interesting", if it's not part of the story a society wants to tell about itself, it's worthless. The future disagrees about what is and is not important, and why. That's the defining characteristic of the future. No one today cares what the Rosetta Stone actually says [4], yet it is more important to us (as the key to hieroglyphics) than it was to the society that made it.
That's a glib answer that ignores the complexity of digital preservation. When you preserve something, you want it to last long term--decades to centuries. Storing things digitally entails choosing software, file formats, and storage media; and the long-term commitment to continuously copy and recopy, convert and reconvert, and test and retest as the technology you choose becomes obsolete. Plus, with digitization, you have the added risk of correctable scanning errors becoming permanent, once the originals are destroyed.
Digital works are some of the most ephemeral ever created, to the point where future historians may experience our era as a kind of dark age:
The people who are actually in the business of digital preservation disagree. To wit: I learned the other day that there are businesses that specialize in transferring digital scans to microfilm to better preserve them (and also ones that go the other way to increase accessibility). Digital and analog formats are complementary.
But it's the software engineer's burden to lecture every other specialist that they're doing it all wrong, and computers, only computers, are the answer and way forward.
We have a book sale room that is about 250 square feet of well lit, clean dry space in our basement with an exterior entrance. We make a few hundred bucks a year from selling books from the sale room. A volunteer staffs the book sale room and organizes, shelves and prices the books. Even with the book sale room, which is open anytime the library is open, we have to throw out hundreds of books a year. It's not worth it to give them away. The local thrift shops and good wills mostly don't want more books.
The space would better serve the community if it were made into a maker space or turned into a classroom for special programs. We could make the entire year of book sale revenue with one by donation 4 week class.
One of the biggest tasks our librarians have is culling books. We are small and it does not serve our community if we keep books on the shelves that haven't been checked out in 15 years.
Yet, I think this basic idea was implemented in the digital realm by iTunes (or someone else) in recent years so that each person would not individually need their own copy of some music file. Instead, they would just stream it from an iTunes server.
Or, and I realize this is a long shot, we could come to the realization that "intellectual property" is an oxymoron.
Small hope, I know.
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-a...
Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...
It's a complex topic, really - on the one hand, you have the boneheaded stupidity of software patents, or of music and movie licensing (that have little to do with compensating original authors and performers, and is instead about middlemen getting rent); but on the other hand, you have drug research and $manybillion silicon fabs, which kind of require IP protection even exist.
Digital storage for all of the US Library of Congress would be about $2,000 last I checked. In ten more years, one tenth that.
(Organising and managing the data, and backups would be somewhat more, but I'm just ballparking here).
Storage is becoming cheaper than any sort of management.
Also, with digital stuff perhaps the calculus is different (although long-term preservation of that seems like a potential challenge), but they're on to something when they say microfiche copies are inferior.
It is also true that the information inside those books is also taxpayer property, but right now the taxpayers can't access it because the Library industry, including it's professional organizations and professional educational programs, is technologically illiterate, but also lost sight of it's mission.
This fellow is called a crank, but he is cranking up the wrong tree. While he is complaining about a small number of important paper journals, and hoarders decry weeding, Alexandra Elbakyan is being threatened with prison for giving away taxpayer funded information - to the taxpayers. And Aaron Swartz... well. Rest in peace man. They just straight up killed him.
There is a saying that for books to survive, what they need is for an enormous amount of people to copy them. That is what allowed the ancient Roman works to survive, long after the Roman libraries were burnt down, and all the Roman bureaucracies in charge of maintaining important works had disappeared. That's why we can read old copies of the Bible or the Koran or the I Ching. That's why we have civilization, because people shared ideas instead of fighting about who, in the long run, far after useful value has been passed to the creator, actually owns them.
It's the modern way in which copyright is enforced, as though violators were terrorists, whether through the military or legal system or NDAs or intimidation, that's a much bigger threat to information surviving the long run, than librarians maintaining their stacks improperly.
[Edit: When I wrote the above comment, had no idea whether or not this is a real book; I made up the title and the [2001] just to exemplify that sort of junk.]
Why was so much money speculated into it?
How hard was it to write code for the early web?
Where is the seminal classic concerning how to program in the language of the era?
Why did 'kazinator' say 'burn that book?'(!)
All this future historian might have to go on could be the review on Amazon, as preserved by the Wayback Machine:
For a supposedly easy-to-use language Java has generated a range of enormous books. The ever excellent Schildt continues the tradition--even allowing for the added coverage of Java 1.3--in this 1,000+ word tome.
Schildt divides the book into four parts. The first third is a solid tutorial on Java programming with neat code examples showing how various features work. Nearly half is taken up with a detailed view of the Java Library followed by 150 pages on Java software development. The last section dissects four Java applets.
Although described as a reference, Java 2: The Complete Reference is a lot more than a list of facts. There's advice, demonstrations of best practice, asides for those using languages such as C and C++ and a pleasant absence of the justifications for various Java design decisions which clog so many books on the subject. Schildt takes the line that Java is the future for Net and networked programs. Coming from perhaps the best-selling writer on C and C++ this is more than interesting. It's a pity Microsoft didn't read it. Perhaps it would have changed its mind about supporting Java.
One oddity is the way Schildt gives more coverage to the largely superseded AWT, the Abstract Window Toolkit, than to its easier and more flexible replacement, Swing. However, both are big areas; perhaps Schildt thinks you should be reading books dealing specifically with these subjects. He'll probably write one. --Steve Patient
Review
First developed in 1991, Java is an excellent first language for the aspiring programmer because of its growing popularity in the development community; seasoned pros will find it easy to learn. Primary among this revised edition's offerings is information on the recently released Java 1.3, known as the 2.0 in the techie world becuase it represents such a major upgrade. Schildt, a renowned programming author, skillfully combines code, theory, and reference matter. Libraries that already own the third edition (1999) should purchase, as Java 1.3 is the only version that Sun Microsystems now supports.
I recognize the author as a well-known butcher of the C language. Future historians wanting to completely understand the term "bullschildt" will benefit from access to his books.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634079
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/micro...
"Microfilm machines haven’t been mined for their decontextualized parts, and they are not yet truly obsolete. The devices are still in widespread use, and their mechanical simplicity could help them last longer than any of the current electronic technologies."
However, go to a college library, and you’ll find tens of thousands of books which are not only not available in digital form, they may be the only remaining copies in existence.
Every time I go to the local college library I’m blown away by the number of obscure books on programming and computer science that simply don’t exist in ebook form, and likely never will (thanks copyright laws!)
That said, some topics like "computing" need serious culling. "Learn Windows 95 in 24 hours" and the hundreds/thousands of utterly obsolete books really should not be wasting space.
That's ultimately what it comes down to... freeing shelf space so there's room for other stuff.
Ebook sales are pretty poor vs paper books overall. They aren’t the future of books, but a niche. Sort of like how VCRs didn’t kill movies, but were a complement.
Not only is this wildly inaccurate, but even if it were true, it would be prohibitively expensive to acquire digital copies of all print books “in the average public library”. It’s worth noting that not all publishers who make ebooks available to libraries use the ownership model; many lease copies, meaning that the library would have to pay for copies again after a certain amount of time had passed or after a certain number of checkouts.
Copyright getting in the way of knowledge and sharing is not new, and purely-digital copies doesn't solve the problem.
Some might be interested: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
Physical books are outdated technology that are bad for the environment and outdated the moment they are printed.
Its a very emotional thing to support the library, I'm not sure why it invokes such strong feelings with children/moms, but I dont think its a smart decision to continue wasting space and resources on physical books.
Note: Nothing is black and white. There should be a strong middle-ground here.
Maybe (some) technical books, but novels are never outdated.