A system where I can continue to explore ideas of philosophy, science and history. A system where I can explore new ideas through the community maker space they host. A system that allows me to recommend thought provoking books to friends, who in turn can explore the ideas regardless of their financial means. A system that helped me triangulate around some much needed knowledge at a pivotal time of change in my life. The place I vote. The place that hosts community events and classes aimed at improving the community.
The picture you paint is a problematic one, for sure. The picture you paint is not universal or inevitable. I do worry that the belief that this is universal can only hasten the demise of the good parts that remain.
I agree that public consumption has been trending anti-intellectual but I don't see how libraries are to blame. Your ire should be directed at modern society. Unfortunately that's a rather broad and manifold thing to dissect to determine where the problems lie.
On the contrary, libraries are there to facilitate the improvement of said "«modern society»".
Even in terms of cultural trends, librarians have a shared responsibility to guide the public. And they did. These decisions are not made solely based on the least-checked-out books but also on ideological factors - what they think is good for the public.
To my larger point, you cannot expect me to shed tears over publishers harming your ability to lend books because of your status as the sacred gatekeeper of public education when you've already abdicated that role. I think there is tremendous public good in free public education. I don't think there is much public good in free public entertainment.
Some things where both written to be high brow and ended up being remembered but that has more to do with quality than their intended audience.
Do you know what belongs in libraries. Books, newspaper, interactive media, movies. The knowledge, writings, and creation of human culture. Humans are not machines. We need both knowledge and entertainment to survive and thrive.
Publishers would lock up society and culture and charge you to use it. Fuck them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...
As you can see, libraries in the US were founded to advance 'learning' and 'piety'.
Here is the treatise of one of the biggest influencers and advocates for the creation of the public library system.
https://ia600909.us.archive.org/10/items/intellectualtorc00t...
I strongly encourage reading all the citations in the Wikipedia article surrounding the creation of the library system. Sadly, many of them are paywalled and inaccessible via even the Archive project, Google Books [ed - to be clear if you think I am pro-publisher, you are wrong: the former two projects had more potential to do good than I can express], and likely your local library. But you can find enough to prove the point.
There has been a massive shift in the mission of libraries in the past several decades, and the public didn't get a say.
The mass destruction of older books and classics is easy to observe by searching your own library catalogue. I provided some sources and one commenter even provided a link where librarians justify the need to destroy books using outdated or biased language.
But the thing is most libraries accept donations so it’s really cheap for them to just keep the kind of books you’re talking about. However, people rarely donate the classics so that tends to cost them actual money.
So, a librarian who mostly sees people come in to use the public computers is likely going to prioritize their budget to maximize the number of public PC’s they can have. That’s going to mean spending less money stocking the classics and more filler.
https://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-anot...
> Imagine holding a beautiful, dusty, illustrated volume of Shakespeare printed in the 1700s, a calligraphic message from its long-dead owner inscribed on the inside cover, and throwing it straight in the trash. I've been there, more than once. I could have kept it and maybe gotten a few hundred dollars for it on eBay, if my supervisor wasn't watching with specific orders to prevent me from doing that.
And again I want to be clear that obviously we aren't hurting for copies of Shakespeare, even though this example is a little sad. It's more niche works that are being erased from human knowledge altogether.
That article is extremely slanted, but it’s hardly desiring some new phenomena. Library shelf space isn’t free and people keep printing new books. Similarly libraries need to do renovations etc. With ~125,000 libraries in the US alone some will be vastly worse than average no matter what your criteria are.
So if you expect all libraries to save thousands of old boy’s life magazine from the 50’s they are going to need to give something else up or you’re going to need to write a huge check with some stipulations. The same is true of books from the 1700’s, there wasn’t any particular value to the books that were trashed even if a few where more memorable.
There is no reason to destroy these away to make room for Biden or Trump's latest ghostwritten memoir or the latest Grishau novel. At any rate, I do not see any reason to publicly fund the sort of institution you seem to envision. The public can entertain themselves on their own dime.
Dumping 100k books is what you do when renovating space for computers used by the poor to do research or access basic functions of government that have moved online is exactly the kind of things libraries should be doing.
Similarly Inter Library Loans are perfect for outdated scientific, technical manuals, or other extremely niche books. If one person in an entire state might check it out per decade then there’s little reason to clog hundreds of libraries with copies. The inter library loan system is a very effective cost saving measure that also improves people’s access to information.
It’s not like people have stopped publishing local history books. Libraries need room for new local books just as they need room for new everything else.
But there’s nuance here. Keeping every single printing of Shakespeare’s plays in the ILL system has minimal value. Similarly the point of local libraries isn’t to archive all knowledge some stuff is going to be trashed.
You are describing how mostly collections should work. They don’t work that way. They work in about the worst way you can possibly imagine. They are in fact junking valuable books for ghostwritten dreck that will itself be thrown away soon.
Sorry, I assumed that was your complaint about the Shakespeare book printed in the 1700’s.
There are multiple orders of magnitude less ghostwritten dreck than self-published books. In publishing the long tail is vast. A library can easily have every book that sold 50,000+ copies from the last 10 years without wasting much space. Simply as a practical measure there just aren’t that many “popular” books.
I am not saying that the tail end of books with 100 copies has no value, but you can’t keep everything for all time. If nobody has checked a book out in a year it’s only so valuable to the local community.
I find nothing wrong with ILL for Plutarch simply on a cost basis. Shipping books around isn’t free, but neither is shelf space. The point where the probability of someone wanting a book is significantly less than the cost of ILL is a real benefit.
Do you have a particular library system, and some examples of books you have been unable to get?
And can you say more about what you mean about libraries making money by destroying books? I've never heard of this, and am not finding much googling.
But I see a lot of value in providing books that the public wants to read, I am confused by your statement that there's no worth in letting people check out John Grisham from the public library. And it's obviously not like John Grisham's income is being hurt either.
For at least couple generations public libraries have seen it as included in their mission to provide the public with the recreational reading people actually want, so at any rate this thing you're complaining about isn't new.
I agree libraries should also be able to provide more than just the most popular books. Which requires they get enough budget to so. Ironically, if they refused to offer books people actually wanted to read, but only offered books some kind of experts thought were to be recommended on, well, whatever grounds you are suggesting should gatekeep what goes in a library -- they would find it even harder to get budgets. People don't tend to support raising the budget of institutions that refuse to give them what they actually want. But the reason to provide popular books isn't just some kind of manipulation of the public -- it's part of the whole mission of public libraries, providing books people actually want to read. And of course, providing for recreational reading, this has been the mission of public libraries for a long time, nothing new about it.
Nevertheless, articles do come out every few years.
https://www.npr.org/2011/10/12/141265066/hard-choices-do-lib...
I thought you were suggesting they somehow got paid by someone for destroying books, when they said "have been pulped (literally, this is a source of income for libraries)". I may have misunderstood.
But sure, libraries get rid of books. Eventually the shelves are full, there's no way to get new books without getting rid of some old books. I don't understand what y'all are suggesting the alternative would be. I suppose expanding storage space forever, if you had the budget, could be an alternative.
But very old books that, say, have not been checked out in many years, are _not_ deemed by experts to be of particular value (you started out wanting experts determination of value to be the _only_ criteria for selection, right? I don't think it should be the only one, but I do think it's one component), _and_ exist on library shelves elsewhere in the region)... don't seem worth spending storage budget on to me. budgets are limited, any money you are spending on storing books nobody needs or wants is money you aren't spending elsewhere. The most challenging part can be last one, making sure at least some library in the region keeps at least one copy, involving cooperation between different libraries. They work on it.
Every year, a room in our town hall is crammed to the gills with book/etc. donations and I'm sure some books from the library itself that people cart away for $10/shopping bag. I'm sure a ton of books never sell and presumably get pulped.
At home, I'm in the same boat. I don't get in as many new physical books as I used to because of Kindle, but if something new comes in, something else has to go out.
Maybe your one copy Thucydides has been checked out 1 time in the past 20 years, and your five copies of $SLIGHTLY_OUTDATED_POP_LIT have been checked out 200 times in the past 20 years (but very little in the past two.) Junk the extra copies of the latter in your branch. In a few more years, junk all but one copy in your library system. In a few more years, junk all but one copy in your ILL network. Soon it will be safe to junk that too, unless you're the Library of Congress.
Instead, they junk Thucydides.
Unfortunately, this requires much more curation and work from librarians, which is why it will not be done.
Personally, I've even gotten rid a lot of my classics from school that were on my shelves at home. I can just download them if I want them.
What makes you think this is not what libraries actually do?
Do you have specific examples from a specific library of them doing something very different from what you describe?
If you aren't going to go by circulation numbers/popularity, then the main obvious other thing to go on is expert opinion. Which I think is what you are encouraging, experts to decide that John Grisham isn't actually "good for people" or something, and Thucydides is. One issue with expert opinion is it's necessarily subjective, any individual person, such as yourself, might disagree with any given decision made by experts, and it's just a matter of opinion whether something was worth keeping why. Perhaps the experts got rid of the thing you think should have been kept, and it has upset you. While no choices are never going to upset anyone, good practice probably combines expert opinion on enduring value, with popularity via circulation stats. And, as you mention, also tries to collaborate with neighboring libraries to divide up the burden of keeping the "last" copy in the region of things deemed worth keeping a last copy of.
Here's one library guide to "weeding" (getting rid of books, also called "deaccessioning"), for anyone interested in how libraries and librarians talk about best practices. Although this one is 15 years old. https://www.tsl.texas.gov/sites/default/files/public/tslac/l...
Nevertheless I don’t think your link helps your case. For example, it suggests books containing the following content should be “deselected”:
> Material that contains biased, racist, or sexist terminology or views
As you can imagine, this allows the disposal of almost all old books regardless of value or status. As I mentioned sometimes book destruction is ideological, but I’d never seen it written down before. Thanks for the cite.
Isn't that what you were asking for, rather than simply using circulation numbers?
I think the scenario imagined there is, say, a textbook about, say, "world cultures" that contains racist descriptions of said cultures. Said textbook is no longer serving the educational purpose it was intended for, and should be replaced by a textbook that serves it better. It may be of "historical" interest demonstrating what textbooks used to be like, and could perhaps be kept for that purpose (especially if no other regional or national libraries have it, and if this is a library that has a mission to have such collections), but it wouldn't be kept for doing the duty it was originally enlisted for.
This doesn't seem especially "ideological" to me. It does to you? What part of it? I assume not the idea that an old textbook that describes populations in racist ways should be removed. How are old educational book to be evaluated for relevance in a "non-ideological" way?
Meanwhile, that is indeed a place where decisions are being recommended on other than circulation grounds. There are other parts of those guidelines that recommend keeping things despite possible low circulation. Here's an interesting one:
> The librarian may also wish to recruit the talents of local experts for particular subject areas (e.g., high school English teachers or college instructors can evaluate the literature section, while area math and science teachers can assess the value of items in those parts of the collection) or languages (e.g., a Spanish-language instructor can help you assess the quality of translations or the relevancy of the Spanish to your community’s readers). Be sure to orient these local experts about the library’s mission before they start. Small and medium-sized public libraries are not research libraries that need to retain material for historical research.
I think that's a good quote because it demonstrates balancing 1) circulation popularity (not mentioned there but mentioned in other parts of the guide for sure), 2) analysis of the "value" of the book by disciplinary experts (that's what you wanted I thought? Experts in, say, classics, who would say to keep your Thucydides as necessary in the collection regardless of circulation numbers? Isn't that where we started?) and 3) the mission of the particular library, which may not to be to keep items of historical interest only.
I don't really understand what are you are asking for. I thought you started out upset that decisions were being made purely on circulation grounds, that librarians didn't put any thought into it, you instead wanted experts using their judgement as to enduring value to the community. I believe this in fact happens, you still don't want to provide an example otherwise, I provide guidelines that recommend that this judgement happens -- and now I feel like you're upset that the experts might make different decisions than you would, you're mad at this too.
I think you agreed that libraries do have to discard materials. Can you explain on what grounds you would like them to decide these things, on what principles? How do you know when a book on, say, world culture, or economics, or history has it's time up? Or a book of literature or fiction? (Keeping in mind that say Dickens or Alexandre Dumas were "popular fiction" at one point, but maybe "literature" now).
I am also still mystified by your lack of interest in providing specific examples. You say that public libraries in general are discarding lots of stuff you'd like them to keep, but are unable to unwilling to provide any examples of an actual public library and what lots of stuff it has discarded that anger you? How are you so invested in something that you don't have any actual examples of?
> Sometimes you can find a paper recycling centre that will pay you for the pulp
I think that is probably pretty rare in 2023, and not a very common practice. That article is from 2011, I think it was probably pretty rare even in 2011.
But let's google... ok, some sources say you can get $75 a ton for paper to be recycled. (I'm honestly still dubious in 2023, and for books specifically as input rather than clean paper without covers or glue, but let's go with it). An average book might weight about a pound. So for pulping 2000 books you might get $75, or under 4 cents a book. If any libraries are in fact getting this revenue, I still doubt this is actually guiding any decision-making. Not sure if you meant to imply it was. Some do make more than 4 cents a book from used book sales, that is true -- if guided by the revenue from getting rid of books at all, used book sales are probably a lot more attractive.
but mostly libraries discard books when they don't think they serve the community anymore, to make room for other books. Not to make money from the discards. I understand people can disagree about what particular book might or might not serve the community anymore. And you apparently do, perhaps with your local library? I'm still interested in specific examples.
I’m not sure you’ve read this NPR article, as it actually explains a lot of nuance in the decisions that libraries need to make when discarding books.
Libraries are in the set of institutions that tamp down on envy, which-- according to many psychologists-- is by far the most destructive emotional force in modern society.
Libraries achieve this by a) offering an array of standard services, many of which are affordable (or even free!) to literally citizen, and b) not attempting to capitalize on offering premium or FOMO services for a bump in price. There's no equivalent of say, an American Express Black Card, at my public library. There is a single, unadorned laminated card offered to every patron, whether that patron is a an oil man or a fourth generation Appalachian hillbilly who just got running water[1].
Moreover, the kids of both the oil man and the hillbilly sit in the same story hour together (well, half hour-- they're kids after all) and get all excited about reading together.
Moreover, those kids are all treated the same by librarians who, like Oprah, end by giving every single participant a prize. (You get a book! You get a book! You get a book!)
But most importantly of all, the people who could not afford to buy the access to these books and programs can participate without feeling like a charity case. They are simply accessing a common resource delivered and paid for by people in the community who care about all the kids and adults who are patrons of the community library. That lowers the barrier to entry and makes it possible for more kids of various income levels to get a head start on reading at the ages when it's most impactful. It's like vectorization for reading enthusiasm.
Finally, that hillbilly or oil man can go to any state in the union, walk in to a public library, and for a small fee get another laminated card that gets them the same access. It's like the McDonalds of American civics.
I rankly speculate here in the bowels of HN that no one has ever envied another person for entering a public library.
I also rankly speculate that if you take a young sibling/niece/nephew to your local library's story hour (ok, half hour), your rhetoric and perhaps even demeanor would soften in quite the same way as the Grinch listening watching people hold hands and sing.
1: Okay, perhaps a single clarifying citation here. I believe the family got running water back in the 80s.
Edit: clarification, formatting
How is this a source of income?
I honestly don't have much sympathy for them. If the situation is that bad for classical works, the situation for works of niche technical, scientific, and local merit is even worse. The amount of works that have been irretrievably lost because they were deliberately destroyed by public librarians is enormous. They've burned through every bit of credit and faith I had for them. I do not see any value in public repositories of the latest John Grisham novels or the latest $POLITICIAN_X campaign book that will be forgotten in six months. The public should not be paying for them.