When will librarians start to throw offline literature away?
roger-pearse.com
roger-pearse.com
Here's a repeat of an anecdote that I've posted before in similar threads: a few years ago I was researching the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. I wanted to find out about his famous housing complex called Unité d'habitation (Housing Unit) first built in Marseille in France. I started my research online looking for floorplans and commentary or critques. I found very little (there is a lot more available online today, but not when I was looking).
Consider that Le Corbusier is one of the most famous architects of the 20th century so this was a surprise. Eventually, I did find what I was looking for by...(yes, you guessed it) going to the library and visiting an architecture exhibition. I ended up scanning some floorplans from a book (and putting them online). From the exhibition, I came across a video of Corbusier talking about the Unité d'habitation - a great find, and I ended up transcribing sections of that interview. None of this information was available on the web.
It's very easy to fall into the belief that the information you find online is likely to be the best or most recent information available on that topic - so the thought of further offline research at a library never crosses your mind. But there is a huge amount of information and knowledge found in books that has never made it online. If you never go to the library, you simply won't realise what you're missing.
The purge had support from people who reflexively promote an optimistic use of ebooks. It's important to remember that the digital-vs-print debate can be exploited to accomplish goals that have little to do with any kind of reading.
The discard book section would have whole swaths of subject matter for the taking. I can only imagine how physical books are getting disappeared now that libraries have leases to ebook services.
I love ebooks, but they are in addition to, not a replacement of print books. Most books are no longer in print and are not available as an ebook. The physical archives are absolutely necessary.
But we also have great tools to manage information, so now it becomes the classic battle of man vs machine and today , in order to be on top , you usually need to combine man and machine which requires a new type of librarian.
A lot of of this works is about attacking various angles of curation and book discovery, tagging books with more in-depth tags to allow better discoverability, giving book reviews, building better search engines , talking with users about books , etc.
But seeing this work mostly done by non traditional librarians, programmers and lay people, and rarely by librarians , i do wonder what role is left for traditional librarians.
This cannot be overstated. It really hit me hard when I realized that Cloud Imperium (a video game developer, Star Citizen) has a librarian on staff.
Hope you aren't an anomaly, have interests / read material that could be used against you or are similar to whatever society thinks the boogyman du jour reads.
With the restrictions the Wassenaar Arrangement can set up, you'd be surprised how quickly many of your mundane professional interests will put you on the radar.
Libraries don't keep records? That's how the killer was caught in the film Seven
If you knew the material you were interested, say "alternative music"[0] might put you on a list, would you check the book out or try to stay off the library's inventory system?
With electronic books, browsing is checking out is an expressed interest in what can make you seem like a terrorist/spy/hacker/who knows to systems that are used to identify enemies of the state.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/25/radica...
Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired in May 2015, but there is great interest in reauthorizing the rights granted to the federal government from that section. For 14 years, the government had the right to track your library usage and issue gag orders to librarians involved.
To say they destroy those records would be an oversimplification. Fighting the government is hard when you're issued a warrant from a secret court and are facing serious prison time for not obeying it.
"The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.
So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before." -- Review by teleread http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/review-rainbows-end/
I think science (as opposed to hype like "big data") will progress faster again once the Internet goes out of fashion.
Also, HN folks, the system of InterLibrary Loans is shockingly driven by manually searching other libraries. There's no system that allows you to automatically find books from other libraries based on metrics of cost of postage or physical distance. Some enterprising HN reader should work on a better ILL system that libraries don't know they need.
http://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/LJS...
What I find more interesting is the changing role of the library as a physical institution, in particular as public libraries have crowded out internet cafes by providing free internet access. Does it still make sense for libraries to provide a large amount of floor space for books, or can that space be used better for more internet stations, more community space, more working areas, or other uses?
Think of plat maps and genealogical records from centuries ago. As a percentage of library artifacts, they'll increase over time.
Plenty of people will be "into" converting popular books. Then a smaller subset are into nation wide distributed but unpopular books. Then books not written in the local language or current language. Finally you end up with artifacts that are valuable to researchers but might only be read every century or so. Consider small town city council meeting records. Or church records of baptisms and funerals (and burials).
Aside from technological or economic collapse (good thing those two have never historically happened and therefore can never happen in the future...) the library of 2030 will be a lot like a museum is today, except perhaps more hands on. So you can walk into the genealogical room and its basically unchanged from 2015. Teen fiction, well, maybe that will be gone entirely. The concept of special collections or rare books will be eliminated because the only remaining books will either be special or rare.
What to do with all the space and salary is interesting. My suspicion is the days of 90%+ of American kids living less than 15 minutes walking distance from a public library are about to come to an end. I live in the county seat and have the largest public library, and probably every library in the county will eventually close and send all their genealogical artifacts to our formerly city now county library. We already have a small county historical society museum and I would not be surprised to see them merge with "the" county library.
Probably not a good decade to try to get a library science degree and become a librarian.
Interestingly there is a subculture that refuses to read off screens, even here, on an online on-screen discussion site, and that combined with very rapid printers and print on demand and ordering online means that bizarrely enough there might be more paper books in 2030 than in 2015, its just that cities won't pile so many up in one building. Much like the decline of public wells as a source of urban drinking water doesn't mean we've evolved past water drinking, it just means we have more faucets than mouths now, including faucets in our homes, so a neighborhood sharing a well seems weird and is basically culturally dead. Likewise in 2030 the idea of sharing a pile of books might feel icky, like a neighborhood sharing underwear or shoes does today.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gate...
I freed up a lot of space in the house, and now I can read anything anywhere.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-new-york-publ...