Saving 4M books from landfill
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
There were library books that for one reason or another made an impression on me as a kid. Sadly of course those old books have been rotated out of the system.
Books that replaced them didn't impress me. (Though perhaps as I have aged I am less impressionable?)
There were some great science and chemistry books for kids when I was young — to be replaced with "grossology" books.
I liked the books that showed future automobiles, spacecraft but I understand why those are dated. I'm not sure I have seen anything that has the same sense of optimism to replace them though.
Or maybe I just prefer the early space-art illustration and concept art in those books done by artists wielding gouache long before CG made everything look bland and lifeless.
In any event I tracked many of these books down on eBay and purchased them. (So often "DISCARD" stamped inside the front cover, a library card pocket inside the back cover.)
Because I am worried that I am becoming a hoarder I was inclined to instead scan many of the books I had collected and then return the original to the sea of used books.
I have uploaded to archive.org everything I scanned.
And I am happy to have in fact also found many other cool books there that I had assumed were going to be lost to time (thinking now about "The Boy Mechanic" bookstore example).
It's such a bummer that public libraries won't have these physical objects on shelves in a discoverable form and place, where people can just stumble upon and page through them.
I've picked through a couple public library "removed from circulation sales" and always find at least one gem there's no obvious good cause for removal. It's hard to not become a hoarder in such situations.
Already brought two such finds home: Bombs Over Bikini [0] and Alaska Crude [1]. They're tiny, and dense with historically relevant photographs. It seems strange to remove them, I suspect it's partly because their contents are dark/depressing/embarrassing to the nation in hindsight. But that's arguably their value IMHO.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18354016-bombs-over-biki...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25135337-alaska-crude
https://www.librarieslearn.org/self-paced-courses/collection...
God only knows how many works have been consigned to permanent oblivion because they were only of local or niche interest, when even notorious classical works that were read for a thousand years are no longer available in many library systems without ILL. (And sometimes not even then.)
Modern libraries are for entertainment, not education, with few exceptions.
Aside: do not donate books to the library unless you do not care what happens to them. If the library cannot sell them they will be pulped. They are almost never added to collections.
Aside2: for some reason rescuing library books from dumpsters is considered theft by some librarians, so be careful.
It's quite apparent when I've explored libraries in small towns on cross-country road-trips. Ideological influence for sure.
That's the basis of hauntology, that optimism for the future has gone, and we are "haunted" by promised futures lost.
Oh, that's kind of awesome. :)
Is the stuff you uploaded in some easy to find list?
Asking because a friend was recently looking for one of the sci-fi art books he had as a child, and we've been looking through Amazon (various countries), Ebay, etc.
Still haven't been able to nail down exactly who the author was, etc. "He'll know it when he sees it" :)
Here's a space-related scan of mine: https://archive.org/details/orbiting-stations/mode/2up
That is absolutely not a library's main goal. A library's main goal is to provide access to information, not preserve it. Archive.org is thinking about what an archive is for. That's is understandable, but don't let their confusion confuse you.
Maintaining a collection another way of saying preserving information over time.
So I would argue IA is correct.
But if your local libraries are anything like mine, the focus is far less about books and more about providing a community space.
This would be a concern for a centralized archive.org I would hope there is a great backup strategy in place that can prevent deletions from the archive
Even a rare book store would glady empty their entire inventory for a price.
In my opinion it comes down to the purpose and reason for existence.
To answer your question I don't think selling a single book makes a library less a library. But if a public lending 'library' had a price tag on every book, I would say it is a bookstore with loans.
In your mind do you consider an iron ore bulk carrier in Australia different from a natural history meusum in France or an iron ore dealer in Argentina? They all store rocks and minerals, including iron ore, and so they could all be called "iron ore storage facilities".
But only one of them has the purpose of studying and preserving artifacts and so it makes sense to create a subclass and call it a meusum.
cf https://www.britannica.com/topic/library/School-libraries
I'd say you're both wrong, and both right: "library" doesn't imply either, in and of itself it's just a repository of material.
Where it leans in its goals depends on the type of library: a national, reference, or research library will likely have preservation as a foremost goal (the first and second especially, but a research library needs to preserve primary and secondary sources no matter how old they are, unless they get punted to a specialised reference library), while a public or academic library will be more concerned with having resources patrons are generally interested in.
The value this will have, both now and hundreds of years (assuming it'll still exists!) will be immeasurable, especially as we now seem to be entering the AI era of human history.
This kills me.
And yet I have boxes and boxes of photos and slides of relatives I never met, many of whom died before I was even born. I feel some obligation to keep them. So they’ve been with me for decades, moving from house to house, a ball and chain of sorts. Will my young son care about it? I don’t know. Why do I feel obligated to keep them? These people lived lives as full as and rich and as real as mine and yours. And the only memory of those lives is in some old photos that in some cases names can’t even be identified.
That's why I'm so glad my grandfather wrote a book about his life when he was in his late 60s. You'd think it would be boring, but his life as an immigrant to Canada from Finland was fascinating, and he only included the interesting bits. The book is only about 150 pages of easy reading, and even people who barely knew him have enjoyed it. So I'm quite confident that he at least will be remembered by his descendants.
A couple of years ago I even digitized it into a website, which makes it so easy to share among the family.
I have started asking my family to give me all of the old physical pictures we have so I can scan and upscale them. But then there’s no good place to share and tag them all for a large family.
One interesting bit is generalisable knowledge can be inferred from old pictures, but that'd be mostly relevant for specific events, or very old pictures.
Although I guess vacation pictures from e.g. the post-war period could be useful for ecological studies, if their location is known. Things like indoor christmas pictures, less so, even though from an emotional perspective they were undoubtedly dear to whoever took them.
Why only a subset of books? I'm guessing some relation to copyright or something similar?
It's a shame that the most common way to access digital books with libraries these days, is through a user-hostile DRM-infected system, held hostage by Adobe and publisher imposed limitations.
With that in mind I can only praise what Archive is doing, even if it's a subset being made available.
Not quite as speedy or as broad in selection as Amazon, but a much nicer option and it's rare not to find what I want. Well worth giving a go.
We're making good use of their picture books collection.
It's great to come across older books that are new to us and we would wouldn't likely come across elsewhere. Also handy to have a huge supply of books in a non-local language. Our library is good but necessary limited in that regard.
A couple big downsides are that the websites are a pain to use and the quality of the scans are occasionally very poor.
Scanned books with ripped pages or lift-the-flap books are annoying. Scans of tactile books are amusing but ultimately also a waste of time.