'Empty shelves with no books': School Library Discards pre-2008 books | Hacker News Reader

'Empty shelves with no books': School Library Discards pre-2008 books

cbc.ca

40 pointsfortran7718 comments

Convinced that people who do this actually don't know how to read very well, hate reading, and hate books. They see books as intimidating and scary. These extremely low functioning people tend to be overrepresented in public teachers and schoolboards, surprisingly. If, therefore, some of the books are EVIL, all the more convenient for them to get rid of these unpleasant objects.

"MUSTIE"

Misleading – information may be factually inaccurate or obsolete.

Unpleasant – refers to the physical condition of the book, may require replacement.

Superseded – book been overtaken by a new edition or a more current resource.

Trivial – of no discernible literary or scientific merit; poorly written or presented.

Irrelevant – doesn't meet the needs and interests of the library's community.

Elsewhere – the book or the material in it may be better obtained from other sources.

Man, I just disagree with the premise of removing books for any of these reasons. The only one that I can see being good is "unpleasant", in which case the book should just be replaced with a new copy.

  > Unpleasant – refers to the physical condition of the book, may require replacement.

I'll bet you dollars to donuts the vast majority of "librarians" are applying this to the content and not the condition.

And that seems very likely to me as a deliberate ambiguity in this stupid acronym.

1984, Orwell: ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

1984 is all I can think of when you ban books prior to a certain year. The French Revolutions year zero certainly comes to mind

> Takata and others are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new equity-based book weeding process implemented by the Peel District School Board last spring.

> book weeding

Because 'book burning' sounds bad, they decided to deracinate the books instead.

All lending libraries "weed" their collections or they'll run out of space and ability to maintain the collection. If you look on AbeBooks, there are loads of ex-library books. I have several very old and very outdated technical books from university library weeding.

It's obviously not ideal, in that if every library could be infinite and books didn't have a small marginal cost to exist in the collection, that would be nice and would allow you to look at that obsolete 1972 book on electronic drawing standard alongside a modern 2022 one without an interlibrary loan. A library weeding is not, by itself, evidence of malfeasance. To be clear, throwing out all books older than 2008, if that is what happened, isn't weeding, any more than napalm is silviculture.

Related reads that might provide more context:

1. https://pen.org/report/booklash/

2. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/the-book-banners-on-the-left

3. https://newdiscourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/drabins...

Huh, thought this was about people on the right trying to ban books over "sexual degeneracy" or whatever, instead its people on the left trying to ban books over "equity".

Man librarians just can't catch a break

Isn’t this just book burning without the fire?

Yep.

"Where they start burning books, very soon they start burning people."

"Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes

Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal

I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library

Line up to the mind cemetery now

What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'

They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em

While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells

Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells"

Given the level of confusion the article describes, this feels like malicious compliance (or malicious interpretation of the rules?) at some level of the hierarchy to me.

Or lazy compliance. They were told to review half the books in the library by June, realized they were about to hit the deadline without even having started, and just said "screw it, toss 'em all to be safe".

Damn, I feel like whenever I see a Canada related article on HN it's always some absurd dystopian shit like this, never anything positive.

As a Canadian it genuinely hurts.

They removed inaccurate books.

I don't know about you, but Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are the most accurate books I've read in 20 years.

You wouldn't drive a 15 year old car. Why read a 15 year old book?

I dunno man, I'd love to drive a Model T for a week.

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