Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons | Hacker News Reader

Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons

boingboing.net

18 pointsr72113 comments

Good story. I completely agree that all of this auto-curation will bury the eclectic collections and poison discovery.

That is one big reason I started my side project, curabase.com[1], to simply enable anyone to curate their own list of bookmarks. (Not a new idea, but it is MY idea based on this singlular thought -- that human curation will always be better, and NO. I don't have data to back it up :-)

But human curation can be bought/influenced. So, in your system, influential curators could be influenced by advertisers to display certain links in their list of bookmarks?

sure. And good for them. The curator risks his own reputation by promoting sponsors with poor content, products, or services that are not relevant to the audience.

I don't mind advertising/marketing so long as it is relevant and timely.

That's assuming the payments were to include something in the list. Influence can also work the other way: take something off of a list.

yeah so what. that is the privilege of having power, you can exchange it for other forms of power.

And again, credibility is at stake. If I curate a list of awesome cloud providers, and IBM pays me to exclude AWS, then I look like an idiot.

Side note: Cory Doctorow mentions "Bellwether" by Connie Willis in the article. Worth reading. See also his review of it [1]

[1] Bellwether: Connie Willis's classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness [ https://boingboing.net/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-... ]

wow, the librarian was fired over trying to keep books in the library. sounds like a deleted scene from Idiocracy.

Says he was suspended, not fired. Also, he was deliberately messing with their metrics. Presumably they want to sell or otherwise discard books that no one is checking out in favor of ones that have useful and relevant information. By pretending that the ones no one cares about are actually popular, you're preventing the library from acquiring books that people actually want to read.

Their metrics may be flawed, but it's not like all discarding of books is a bad idea.

good call, thanks for clarifying the librarian was suspended, not fired.

But you create a false dichotomy between books no one checks ou' and books with useful and relevant information. if a book doesn't get checked out for, say, a year, is that an indication that it contains no useful information? on what basis?

i'd go further and say this is not a case of flawed metrics but flawed ideology. i don't want my tax dollars to fund the book-equivalent of redbox. i want my tax dollars to fund the preservation and archiving and availability of knowledge, regardless of how 'popular' an algorithm says it is.

granted, a library cannot hold infinite books. but i'd take the curation of a librarian over an algorithm any day of the week.

It's not a false dichotomy, I'm saying that some books need to be culled and that they need to make decisions about it. One of the metrics they have to use to make those decisions is what is being checked out and, like I said, regardless of how they use the metrics, this guy was manipulating them. It would be better if he made the argument that they shouldn't use the metric than to just manipulate the metric into doing what he wanted.

I'm guess that, like me, he's appalled that a library should choose to discard useful books on the basis of popularity. I'd manipulate goofy metrics like hell to preserve the collection too. Else you end up with a popular-culture library with a memory of a year or so. Instead of a true library.

All that's been said. I'm just agreeing with the strategy to defy the Philistines at all costs. The librarian was a hero.

Or a prequel to Fahrenheit 451 :(

A good plot idea for dystopian novel.

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