One of my local libraries recently threw out a dumpster full of books. There was a minor public outcry at the desecration of literature. The books in the dumpster had all been on sale for the last year, priced at 10p (13 cents) each. Most of them hadn't been checked out for over a decade and some hadn't been checked out since the 1970s.
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.
You can't have an up-to-date library without pruning. I'm given to understand it's seen as an essential part of maintenace by librarians. Some time ago I recall having a discussion on this site about it -- I think somebody had posted a link to a set of guidelines for pruning.
They should try to give the books away for free before chucking them out, no?
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.
>They should try to give the books away for free before chucking them out, no?
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.
It's a nice idea, but the library is the place I go when I have books I would rather give away for free before chucking them out. What do I do with the free books I took when I'm done with them/can no longer accommodate them?
Free books are never 100% free ... because bookcases cost money and even if you pile books up on the floor, that is expensive real estate you now can't easily use for another purpose. Hoarders forget that the opportunity cost of storage drives most of their possessions into negative net worth. Source: I have hoarder tendencies.
> Sending books to be pulped is always sad, but the truth is that there are just too many books.
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.
I agree with this - I think there is a lot of value in having hard-copies, if just for the ability to walk through the shelves and pick something up. I know most people don't do this, I know it's not cost effective, but I have walked through my University's library and picked up a random book here and there.
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.
Maintaining digital records would probably require some man hours to watch them over the years, and you'd probably need to hire some tech labor to migrate the data every so often. That long-term maintenance cost can't be ignored.
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.
To what degree is preservation the responsibility of a local lending library? (As opposed to an archive; a museum; the Library of Congress; county courthouses; etc?)
> To what degree is preservation the responsibility of a local lending library? (As opposed to an archive; a museum; the Library of Congress; county courthouses; etc?)
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.
Still not sure the local library should be responsible for the actual preservation, but I like your idea on principle -- maybe having a more central organization or archive handle the preservation and coordinate determining what needs preserving (e.g. how is that local library to know that every other library in the country pulped that particular children's book 10 years ago?)
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.
Yeah, that's my feeling too. No one is "losing" these books. Archival libraries like the Library of Congress exist and are very good at their jobs. (Though I still cry sometimes that the Google Books project didn't work out as originally envisioned).
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.
Every librarian worth their salt knows that weeding is just as important as selection and acquisition.
The most emotional people in regards to weeding are often people that read too little, but idolize the object of the book.
Libraries throw away tons of books and stuff. If a man-made object is degraded to the point where it's garbage, why not? Sure, some of these tomes may have been recoverable, but if they aren't historically valuable for some reason, why save it? Same thing with any "historical" object, do you imagine that we'll want to save a copy of "Getting done in my butt by my butt" when it's old and yellowing just because it's old?
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.
>If a man-made object is degraded to the point where it's garbage, why not? Sure, some of these tomes may have been recoverable
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.
Not all books that are read are checked out. I think that some kinds of books should have a sheet or something so each person who reads it in the library can leave a mark. I'm still angry about the Dirac library moving a beautiful 1890's book on steam engineering to storage because "no one was checking it out". Of course no one was checking it out, it was a reference work!
>Sure, some of these tomes may have been recoverable, but if they aren't historically valuable for some reason, why save it?
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.
> So store it digitally where it takes up less space. No need to keep a physical copy around.
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:
Don't bullshit me, copying files and applying error correction is trivial compared to maintaining paper copies of books which degrade and burn. We write emulators for just about every popular old computer system, so even if you have to use a dated reader to extract the info, should be possible. We have whole organizations dedicated to digital preservation that would have no issue doing this for millions of books.
> Don't bullshit me, copying files and applying error correction is trivial compared to maintaining paper copies of books which degrade and burn.
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.
At public library where I worked as a youth we
also end up getting rid of most of the "donations", keeping the occasional worthwhile book that seemed like it might actually fetch a buck at the annual book sale.
I serve on the board of an incorporated library and until just recently was the board president.
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.
The University of Toronto has a 'cull and sell' procedure and culled books are placed in the weekly Wednesday noon swap shop where anyone can buy all they can carry for a $1 donation. At the last swap for the season in May there were 15 large wheeled boxes of about 1 cubic yard each filled to the brim and another 20 trash totes a little bigger in the yard.
Few sell. There is a steady crowd of people picking at them.
I suspect their fate is pulp after they have been well picked. There used to be huge numbers of old computers etc. in the swap shop, but after a number of people cut themselves on sharp steel edges, they now accumulate and allow department employees only to scan and fill out a card so their department gets the asset if it has any enduring value - if not taken = scrapped by a recycling company approved for proper recycling of computers etc.
Another complication was the development of the sulfite pulping process in the 1800's. This leaves residues of SO2 in the paper, which combined with H2O makes H2SO3 - sulfurous acid. This is a weak acid, but in time it cuts up cellulose and the paper is weakened and friable - eventually it turns to dust. Old linen paper or paper that has been washed and treated/sized to eliminate the SO2 (archival paper) can last a lot longer
The University of Texas at Austin seems to put a lot in storage instead of throwing it out. But they have thrown things I am interested in out before. I recall checking the catalog for a well known journal which has been entirely digitized. Unfortunately a plot that had data I wanted was illegible, so I went to scan the plot. Apparently they had just thrown out the journal a day or so before I arrived and had not updated the catalog to reflect that yet. I was very confused as there was nothing at all where the journal should have been. Fortunately a librarian was able to figure out what happened. I can recall them saying "I knew something like this would happen..." I eventually got a scan via interlibrary loan.
Recently donated some new philosophy books to my public library (A.C. Grayling Philosophy 1 & 2) but even in mint condition, and the library having almost no philosophy section, it still went to the 'bargain / to be sold cart'. I was told that all the books are managed by a private company, and the library doesn't really control what comes or goes - the company does. So any / all donations go straight to the cart, no matter what they are.
I let the used bookstore throw away my books. There are lots of categories they say they won't accept (like computers) but I bring them all. I tell them to just give me a total price. They don't give me back any books. I really do not like throwing away books.
It's interesting that one of the ideas this article criticizes is a harebrained combination of closed-circuit television and a "pneumatic page turner", intended to allow readers to study a book in a library many miles away so that only one copy would need to be kept.
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.
Ironically, out of these two, it's iTunes that's more harebrained. Considering that digital storage is almost free, and it's wasteful to transfer bits across half the planet each time you want to listen to a particular song again, streaming is a... pretty suboptimal solution. Especially that you essentially relinquish ownership of your own media, being instead at the mercy of a service provider. Alas, this was the way to work around the huge mess that is IP laws.
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.
It's in the sense that the current implementation of idea ownership is mostly a ham-fisted exercise in rent-seeking. Ideas work best when left to spread, mix, and be freely used.
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.
What about the storage space? How efficient is it to have the same music duplicated on countless hard drives, in most cases not having been listened to anytime recently?
An album is probably for the purposes of discussion somewhere between 70 and 700 MB. Is keeping millions of copies of it in storage really cheaper than streaming? The "management" has to be in place either way, or how do I get them on disk in the first place? The costs of each individual steam are not, I suspect, very large
A lot of this discussion revolves around lending libraries getting rid of junk nobody wants to read and which is likely available elsewhere, but the article largely concerns destroying the world's only copies of newspaper runs, which seems different in kind to me.
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.
The crux of the library in 2018 is exemplified here. It is important to have public input to the weeding process (thats what it is called in the US), because libraries are inherently hierarchical government bureaucracies, but funded by taxpayers, so taxpayers should have a say. Those books are essentially taxpayer property.
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.
Library books should definitely destroy shelf litter, like your 900 page "Java: The Complete Reference [2001]" type stuff.
[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.]
In 100 years time this book will become of great interest to historians that are studying the dot com boom and wanting insight beyond the newspaper headlines of the era. What was it that powered this dot com thing?
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.
My comment isn't actually about this specific book; I made the title up impromptu, and so it refers to a category of book in my imagination. (See comment edit.) Of course, that specific book constitutes an example of what I'm talking about.
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.
If the book is preserved digitally or otherwise that seems good enough; the library doesn't have infinite space to keep every old book that nobody ever looks at.
You could plausibly see someone wanting to research the history of programming being interested in such a thing, but in general, you know, there isn't room for everything.
I also have an emotional reaction to seeing books destroyed but the bottom line is that many products in this world see demand reduce precipitously, rendering them obsolete. There simply aren’t many ways to use a computer monitor from 1985 or a book about the immune system from 1937.
I would be interesting if there was some type of public disclosure requirement before this type of thing happened. It seems like a perfect setup to allow the general public to collect them.
Since libraries in any town I frequent have tended to turn into internet cafes and homeless shelters, they might as well dump the books to make space for a few more computers.
"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."
I like the bit in one of Asimov's Foundation novels, where they find a derelict planet, essentially dead for several millenia, yet quickly find the library and repair the microfilm machine.
The article is from 2002, as part of the man's PR to support his 2001 book published on the topic, which explains the fellow's curious fixation on 90s topics like microfiche and the elimination of card catalogs.
Most public libraries would be better off without books. All of the books in the average public library exist in digital form.
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!)
Libraries serve many different needs and for many, books are still important.
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.
That’s a wacky position. Ebooks with the exception of reference material are dramatically less accessible and more expensive.
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.
“Most public libraries would be better off without books. All of the books in the average public library exist in digital form.”
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.
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.
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.