Librarians create fake users to trick software into saving books | Hacker News Reader

Librarians create fake users to trick software into saving books

boingboing.net

29 pointsjedberg15 comments

I think this quote sums it up pretty well: "That's the important takeaway here: these librarians didn't monkeywrench their software for personal gain. They did it because they wanted to make the system better, to teach it how to weight the circulation data to reflect the on-the-ground intelligence and historical perspective they had on their libraries, their collections and their patrons."

In other words, they felt like the data that the software was using to make a decision was incomplete.

A problem we are likely to see more and more as we rely more on algorithms.

Maybe the decision shohld have been made by the librarians themselves rather than an algorithm.

All decision-making is some form of algorithm.

I'm sad that this problem could be so easily addressed if there was a sane digital alternative to borrowing print books. All of the (legal) alternatives I've seen have been absolute pains to deal with, and some of them are too expensive for non-institutional libraries to carry.

If low-demand books could be kept in circulation digitally, you wouldn't have all of these costs attached to storing books, and this problem would go away.

I think they could solve this with a "librarian's choice" factor in the algorithm. It should be reviewed regularly, but it could allow the library to hold on to older "classics" of merit while devaluing so called "pulp fiction," even if readership would mean they should disappear.

similar stuff happens in my local library I'm sure. They have a detector at the door, to count the patrons entering and leaving. I've seen the librarians walk in and out a few times every half hour to boost the numbers.

and why are the books being purged ? Because there's not enough space to store all of them.

why is there not enough space ? because books take up a lot of space for the amount of information they contain.

why do they take up so much space ? because they cannot be digitized.

why can't they be digitized ? because of archaic IP law.

Good digitalisation is far from bring trivial or cheap, especially if the book has some scientific content or is old enough that something is different (like s forms in the old books). Still it would be nice if the interested parties would be allowed to do it.

Even if they were digitized, not everyone has an electronic device able to consume digital content like that.

So imagine instead a library where every book ever written was stored digitally, and the library had an automated print and bind station. So to begin with, the library would be empty shelves, perhaps taking some books off the load of nearby similar libraries.

When you come in, you can look for the book you want. If it's not on the shelf, you order a print, and in half an hour it's ready. Take it, read it, return it. It goes on the shelf.

When the shelves get full, recycle the materials of the least used, or redistribute the books to where they appear more in demand.

Now, access to e-readers is no longer a problem, and any book you want can become available in hard print, and we solve the space problem by simply regarding shelf space as a cache for the most in demand books. Additionally, when books become worn, damaged, or unnecessary, we can reuse the materials.

Or loan out some dirt cheap e-readers.

exactly. they could have locked-down library-only e-readers that only show the books you checked out.

Locked down library only ereaders do exist - the Playaway Lock: http://playaway.com/lock/

librarians sure have read Fahrenheit 451

Luckily the movie is easily availabe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0bVqgBSZHk

Software may not be objective (depends on the design process) but the librarians are definitely not objective. At least the software itself isn't committing fraud to try and justify it's own existence.

Ultimately, we've fallen into the trap of trying to appease everyone when it's not sensible to do so.

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