I have begun taking my children to the local library, and I am shocked at how bad the selection is. There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest. And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang. This is wildly different from the collections that I grew up with, in libraries trashed now by standard publishing spam, despite having vastly more money and space than they did when I was a kid.
Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has little or nothing to do with "battling" misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be about librarians championing a very bland and particular political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.
My town votes 50/50 Republican/Democrat, yet our newly rebuilt library is filled with lib/women oriented non-fiction and contemporary women’s pulp fiction. They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias. It’s not possible to learn much about science or technology there anymore - they weeded much of that out during the remodeling.
Women reading mostly romance and the occasional “young adult” fantasy book is practically the only market left for authors, if they want to sell fiction.
Science and tech is obsolete like the format of paper encyclopedias? (It isn't.)
It's worth considering if a short-term focus on stocking fad romantasy comes at the long-term expense of a body of knowledge. Consider the classic value of college degrees - they're (largely) not optimized for fad pop knowledge or even vocational skills, instead optimizing for a rounded body of knowledge considered to be broadly 'educated'.
I don't doubt you, but in many locations you don't have to take your children to the local library. For example I lived in Sunnyvale for a long time, and yet after visiting the nearby libraries I decided to get a library card at the Mountain View public library. It doesn't matter I don't live or work in Mountain View.
In this particular city, at least, it's cultural malaise, and one that is hard to escape just by going to another branch. That said, there are some good used bookstores out here (not the big chain stores) that have great collections.
> There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest.
I've noticed this at my library as well. I was shocked that there wasn't a copy of Spinoza's Ethics which seems kinda basic. That being said, I think people underestimate how much garbage each generation produces. Past generations have done the work of curating the good stuff of their time for us.
> And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about but I'm going to take a leap and assume you're complaining about the presence of LQBTQ books in the library. I've noticed this trend where conservatives think that any book with queer characters is sexual by definition. People get upset by children's books with 2 dads that are just like any other book and it's honestly tiring. Queer people exist and have normal, boring lives and there's nothing inherently sexual or pornagraphic about that.
Let's not jump to the gun here. It could be as well that there's nothing there, or so on. And being accused of something you didn't is something I think we'd all want to not deal with.
That being said, I do also very much hope it's not what you say because I've been noticing that trend too :(
In a world with so many different opinions, where you know neither my nation or city or native language, it's odd that you would immediately jump to this. After all, my library could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era revanchist apologists, or so on. Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means it either.
> After all, my library could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era
I admitted it was a leap and you're absolutely free to clarify what you meant instead of pointing out some ridiculous edge cases without explaining yourself.
> Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means it either.
I don't see how having books with queer characters is propaganda but having books with straight characters isn't. I'm queer and I don't go around insisting that people ban Christian books from the children's section even though I think those values aren't great.
But why did you make that particular leap with your utterly baseless accusation? And why are you saying that anyone else propagandizing children would be "ridiculous edge cases"? I urge you to work out your priors.
That’s because librarians have been making a concerted effort to “deaccession” (throw them into the dumpster or send them for pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters into ideological territory - old books might contain unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them.
In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries.
> Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity." And step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.
When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."
For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."
So besides the "no old books" that was purportedly a misunderstanding is the official policy, there was also explicit ideological filtering.
Yup, they employed intense scrutiny on books before 2008, followed by ideological filtering as you noted, resulting in empty library shelves.
On that note, it's sad to see the GP downvoted for raising this uncomfortable truth. I guess "deaccessioning" or "weeding" reveals a certain hypocrisy among those who supposedly hate banning books.
> Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
I think you might be missing that there are many different types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents.
Yet these same local libraries used to be filled with the sorts of books I'm talking about. They threw them away to replace them with DVDs of Marvel movies, the worst dreck imaginable in the children's section, and shelves and shelves of the latest romance and mystery novels, along with whatever "hot" ghostwritten politics book is out.
Frankly, I look at that is abandoning their original mission and no longer feel inclined to support them in any way. Libraries should have led their communities as centers and sources of learning. What we have now is something else wearing libraries as a skinsuit, and I don't see why libraries like this deserve public support as a library.
But at any rate, as I said, the problem is not limited to municipal libraries, it's ongoing even at institutional libraries.
Just a few days ago, I visited the community college library reference desk. We were discussing and browsing the shrinking stacks of reference volumes.
I commented that some of these extant books must be kept because it was difficult to typeset or compile them electronically, and I pointed out a “Lakota language dictionary”...
but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me, and she said that electronic resources were great and fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue, because the Lady of the House is always right
There's something about that that simply sounds dangerous to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a certain resiliency in keeping printed copies of reference materials: they cannot be changed, disappeared (other than unloading them into the bin), or made impossible to access (unless the library starts putting books behind lock and key). If I want to learn about gardening (for example), I'd much rather get a reference text at the library than search for stuff online... which half the time is clickbaity or AI-generated trash.
It's not like the librarians have unilateral choice here. Old books on the shelves get vandalized and stolen; new books are not easy to come by, due to reduced print runs and supply-chain issues. How many times have we heard complaints about Amazon orders being "print-on-demand", and the quality is horrible? And if a published book is typeset in original PDF format anyway, why not distribute it that way to begin with?
Librarians have the demand side to cope with too. Personally, I don't enjoy checking-out books from the library. They're heavy; they require a backpack to carry them; they're not ubiquitously available to me wherever I am; they need to be physically lugged back to the same place where I found them. So yeah, I'd rather have an eBook.
But I contend (not in front of librarians) that a book such as a "Lakota Language Dictionary" is irreproducible in electronic form, because scholars have striven to compile those in print form; they developed new orthographies and documented the existing ones; and any new electronic-format dictionary must be recompiled, retypeset, and re-edited to satisfaction for a new publisher. So we won't have the same materials.
I used to derive great joy from finding really old copies of the Vedas, or a Navajo dictionary, but mostly Hindu texts in the original scripts. And yeah, they were painstakingly compiled by British colonisers and oppressors. But that history is preserved because of those colonists having a scholarly interest in "Hindooism". And those Vedic texts, and Panini's grammar, will not be directly transcribed to eBooks. They may take photographic images of them and shove them into a PDF, but those volumes will be given short shrift, because they're all Public Domain anyway.
The money's in stuff that you can copyright and IP that you can defend. And that's where libraries and librarians are going to follow.
Well, you don't need to think too hard about this when sites like archive.org are in legal danger, and the dream of Google Books is dead. I had not considered the "everything on the Internet is AI/SEO slop now" - that's a good point too: even if the stuff exists online, it's often almost impossible to find.
A few months ago I half-remembered a quote from a famous philosopher. Google and Bing returned only the vaguest, most useless search results - basically assuming I didn't actually want the quote, but general information about the philosopher. So then I turned to ChatGPT, which asserted that no such quote existed, but here were ones "like it" (they weren't.) Finally I skimmed through all the books I had until I located it.
Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has little or nothing to do with "battling" misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be about librarians championing a very bland and particular political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.