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Similarly Inter Library Loans are perfect for outdated scientific, technical manuals, or other extremely niche books.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.
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.