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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

Why would this record even exist? What purpose does it serve?

Library books used to have a little pocket stuck to the back cover, with a lined card inside. If you wanted to borrow a book, you would take out the card, put your name on the next line, and give it to the librarian. When you gave the book back, the card was put back into the pocket.

The system was to keep track of who had borrowed a book, so that they could be tracked down if it was not returned.

I remember it being really fun in grade school, to realize I had checked out the same book as an older friend.

I'm from a more metropolitan area i guess. we used library card numbers on those instead of names

> I'm from a more metropolitan area i guess.

I would be surprised if you are from somewhere more metropolitan than Kobe Japan [0]. It is much more likely that you are just young.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keihanshin

Population density is considerably less than that of NYC. Scaling NYC up to 13,000 km² would put the population 90 million

The population density is also much less if we scaled the population of my apartment up to 13,000 km², but that isn't how metropolitan areas are traditionally measured. The NYC metro area includes three states, lots of sprawl - so it is much less dense.

I remember the local village library books only had dates on the borrowing slips.

My library card was a 5x5cm card sleeve. If I borrowed something, the return date was stamped in the book, and on the book's removable 5x15cm slip. That slip was put inside my card, and probably ordered by due date in the librarian's index file.

This was early 1990s in Britain.

Or to check out books that you didn't remember checking out before!

As a kid I enjoyed finding books that hadn't been checked out in decades or old books that had only one or two checkouts in its lifetime.

I always enjoyed seeing the names of people who had read a book before me at the university library, and seeing how long it had sat on the shelf between readers. It was like joining a secret club that spanned generations.

"In early 1943, Ulam asked von Neumann to find him a war job. In October, he received an invitation to join an unidentified project near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The letter was signed by Hans Bethe, who had been appointed as leader of the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory by Robert Oppenheimer, its scientific director. Knowing nothing of the area, he borrowed a New Mexico guide book. On the checkout card, he found the names of his Wisconsin colleagues, Joan Hinton, David Frisch, and Joseph McKibben, all of whom had mysteriously disappeared. This was Ulam's introduction to the Manhattan Project, which was America's wartime effort to create the atomic bomb."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Ulam

Picture of a Library card:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Library_card.jpg

The Browne Issue System appears to be what most small libraries used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browne_Issue_System

The studio ghibli movie, Whisper of the Heart has a plot point that revolves around this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart

Given that Murakami is 66-years-old, I imagine that the school he went to used paper and pencil/ink to record transactions, and like most school libraries, failed to hire someone properly certified in data retention regulations who would have properly disposed of those records...I'm only being half-facetious here..I think you're wondering if there is some machination resulting from a mass surveillance policy at play here...it could be something much more innocent: papers that are just stashed away in a school's storage room:

> The cards were apparently leaked to the paper after a volunteer who once taught at the school came across them while he was sorting out old library books that were to be thrown away.

The reason why we don't hear about these kinds of data leakages is because paper usually gets thrown away. Or a building burns down/floods. And also, paper records don't come up in a Google search (which is the extent of "research" for many people today).

Why didn't the school back then have a policy of throwing away cards after x number of years? Probably for the same reason why anything was done before computers became so ubiquitous...we constantly underestimate how the power of computation and networking changes the accessibility of information. Back when I graduated from college (and by this time, Google was a major player), no one really complained about printing people's names (i.e. mostly students) in the police blotter. Now, I believe it is a rarity for a school newspaper that publishes online to also publish full names of the suspects, even though no federal/state laws have been passed that would require such discretion. The reason why this practice is now rare is pretty common-sensical to us today, but not so much when Google was still relatively new.

Why would anybody want this information destroyed. Protected until the person is long dead sure, but destroyed? A lot can be learned by seeing what experiences someone has had. Would you not want to read what Plato had read? How about Jefferson or Tesla?

Because there's a huge amount of paper you might want to keep. And storing paper costs a lot of money.

It takes up a lot of space, and has to be kept dry within a reasonable temperature range. Academic libraries spend tidy sums on climate control to keep their books from rotting away. It also has to be indexed and filed so it's possible to find what you're looking for.

If you do it properly, you end up with something like this:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

So the costs are non-trivial. And most people would consider library loan records trivial information. So there are good economic and practical reasons for throwing them out.

Besides, it's unlikely Plato, Jefferson, or Tesla did most of their reading in libraries. (Karl Marx did, but he was probably an exception.)

I doubt patrons ever agreed, even implicitly, that should they ever become famous their reading habits would become a matter of public record, and maybe given to the newspapers. These records were never meant to be preserved in perpetuity for scholars and historians to pick through, so of course they aren't. Should the stores where Haruki Murakami shopped also save all of his receipts so we can know his dietary habits as well?

However, would they had been agreed to that some future historian century after their lifetime would spend their career studying their reading lists, if they once turned out important enough? Or that this data would be used to research what kind of books people read, for some obscure cultural history research project?

Heck, many people keep personal diaries, and most surely would object to people reading them without their permission while they are alive. On the other hand, their diaries are prime sources on given person's life to biographers, which is one reason some people keep them.

I understand literature and history departments at universities love this kind of sources.

Maybe, maybe not. Franz Kafka wanted all of his unpublished manuscripts to be burned after his death, but that didn't happen.

While I tend to agree with you, your position implies we possess an inherent right to that information. Do we inherently have the right to review all your private information, even after death?

Of course; dead people have no rights. It couldn't be otherwise.

You may be thinking of the courtesy extended to the living heirs of dead people.

I spoke nothing of the rights of the dead. I asked if we (the living) possessed the right to view the private information of the deceased by mere virtue of the fact they are deceased.

Think about the reverse though - the days where one could be branded as unpatriotic communist for reading Marx in the US are not a long time ago!

In the documentary "Black Power Mixtape" Kweli mentions that he's called in to chat with the FBI because he listened to Stokely Carmichael speeches:

"Carmichael’s words continue to resonate 40 years later, says Kweli, who was stopped in an airport after 9/11, by “the FBI, the CIA, and the TSA,” because the government knew that he had been listening to Carmichael’s speeches. What these agencies and other authorities who remain fearful of black power miss, says Kweli, is that Carmichael, a “fiery speaker, “was “just a regular dude.” Exhibit A, for Kweli, is the interview with Mabel Carmichael, where the son respects his mother’s strength and dignity."

http://www.popmatters.com/review/148310-the-black-power-mixt...

(Highly recommend the movie, as a wonderful window into the recent past)

It lets the police track down murderers, at least according to the plot of Se7en...

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