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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

That's the thing I don't really get about libraries. They are incredibly deletionist.

My pet theory: the librarians feel they have power that way, by "curating" the collection that will presented to the peasants.

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The much bigger problem is that copyright doesn't allow people to scan books/magazins and distribute the scans. As DanBC writes "Climate controlled storage [...] is expensive". On the other hand: Disk space is very cheap (even if you want high redundancy).

The Internet Archive has a "lending library" of post-1923 books where we own a physical copy, stored in a shipping container in a warehouse, and loan one digital copy at a time for each physical one that we own.

https://blog.archive.org/2010/06/28/digital-lending-library/

https://archive.org/details/lendinglibrary&tab=about

We're hoping to get libraries to join with us to make their books in remote storage available in a similar fashion.

wow. did you get shushed by a librarian as a child?

Librarians are not power mad media moguls. Librarians and Libraries are closest the non-IT world has to open source/free software/knowledge sharing. They have always been a fantastic resource for the "peasants" as you call them.

Please see http://awfullibrarybooks.net/why-weed/ for a justification of why a library might reduce its collections.

While there may be some power-mad librarians out there in terms of 'there will be silence in the library!', they curate the library's collection for many reasons: to meet the requirements of stakeholders, to meet the needs and shifting interests of the community, to make room for new material...

Really, there are a whole host of reasons for deaccession of library materials that include financial, space, and other concerns that hit the bottom line.

The great thing about technology is we have the ability to collect, classify, add metadata[1], and make all human knowledge accessible to everyone. If only insanely long copyrights and restrictions on scanning and lending copyrighted works were not in the way.

[1] This is not really something a busy librarian has time for, so other methods, such as user-driven tagging and folksonomies[2] are an interesting solution that is being tried.

[2] http://interactivearchivist.archivists.org/technologies/tagg...

I don't like deletion very much either in general, although I've seen librarians defend themselves with 1. that they totally don't have room for stuff 2. for kids' stuff, at least, if it's science, our knowledge has grown so much that it's a disservice for them to read the old book without context. Or if it's fiction, it can be full of social norms and beliefs that we've grown beyond, where...we'd also want them to have context if they were going to read it.

But it sucks when you hear how they often don't have a good sense of the value (intellectual or otherwise) of what they cull. And it sucks if everyone makes the same judgment and all throw away our ephemera that we wish to look back, evoke memories, reveal something of our time.

Most libraries (in Europe, at least) tend to have an incredibly low density of books. I think the image of a good-looking library is more important to them than to actually have more books on the shelves.

E.g. something like this (the main public library in Linköping, Sweden):

https://cdn3.cdnme.se/cdn/7-2/1081760/images/2012/dsc_0337_1...

rather than something like

http://f.tqn.com/y/seattle/1/W/V/F/-/-/IMG_8459.JPG

Damn, how do they keep the books from falling out of those sideways shelving units in Seattle? ;-)

Kenmore's public library has a low density of books as well - wide aisles, low shelves. I suspect it is partly due to wanting to be accessible to people in wheelchairs. But few books kinda defeats the purpose of having a library.

Half-Price Books in Bellevue is more my speed. It's completely packed with books. I could putter away hours in there.

They are trying to serve their patrons with limited resources. Getting a new box of books in means that something old has to go. I don't think it's more sinister than that.

As a librarian using my summer weeding, I can tell you that that is not the case. Having a large, irrelevant, unruly collection is a great way to make a library useless for the users. A library is not an archive. Other collections take care of long term storage. Primarily national libraries through legal deposits.

Edit: Worldcat shows 570 libraries have the magazine in their collection, and every library worth its salt can get it from them by inter library loan. So its not hard to get your hands on by a long shot.

Libraries are underfunded. Climate controlled storage for stuff that most people won't use is expensive. There are some libraries the do keep everything, so it's not "lost".

But they don't scan everything or even ILL everything, so it's pretty lost by contemporary standards.

It'll get there. We have a gap now, but many national libraries and other large collections do understand the value of scanning and making available. Part of the challenge is that they then to will prioritise old and rare publications to things like these magazines, especially when copyright limitations makes it challenging to publish the newer material.

There are many quite decent publicly accessible collections of computer magazines, though, because of the audience - other types of magazines are in a worse position.

I can say I've looked for Creative Computing in some of the largest and most prestigious libraries on the east coast of the U.S. and the haven't had it. It wasn't just the public libraries that thought it was obsolete, it was the big academic libraries too.

Every librarian I've ever spoken to has been incredibly good at pointing me in the right direction if they didn't have anything in the local library. They understand the need for archival, but they are also limited in space and money and need to focus on what their typical users actually read.

If you can't find something, ask your librarian where it might be available. Generally they can give suggestions, and may even spend time helping you search.

In my teens had libraries contact specialist libraries and dig obscure translations of works out of vaults for me where they could have just told me sorry and pointed me to the several newer/more mainstream editions of the same work they had out (I was transcribing some books where the newer translations were still in copyright and where I was also hunting for additional forewords), despite being young enough at the time that they could've easily dismissed me as not having any "important" reasons to trouble them with asking for just those editions.

My experience is that if you're nice, most librarians love it when they are asked for something unusual by someone who clearly cares about the books.

Easy, there. Librarians aren't the bad guys in this story.

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