How libraries decide which books to keep
medium.com
medium.com
It just occurs to me that it could be really fun to work as a technologist for a library. In the light of this article, it sounds like there's room to automate and enhance some stuff: scrape literary review websites for up and coming authors, apply machine learning to the library's records to find out if there are underlying trends in borrowing that can inform acquisitions, events, etc. And of course you could write cool visualizations to highlight the different metrics.
As a kid, the library was my second home - I'd go there after school almost everyday, and Saturdays from opening to closing. The library was a short 5 minute walk from my parents' house, which in retrospect is probably the thing that influenced my intellectual upbringing the most. (programming came right after, in my early teenage years) It remains with me to this day: I have a deep love for books, and dream of the day when I can accommodate a basement with rows and rows of bookshelves.
I kind of want to work for a library now!
Being a technologist for libraries sounds awful, though. They deal all day w/locked-down journals, proprietary databases, the MARC formats, and various systems from the 60s - and I'd need more than I make now to work with that crap.
For shame.
I also recommend checking out LibTechWomen[2] and Information Technology and Libraries[3].
[0] http://code4lib.org/ [1] http://jobs.code4lib.org/ [2] http://libtechwomen.tumblr.com/ [3] http://www.ala.org/lita/ital/
I have never understood the technologist position in place. In this particular library, I could really impress them with automation ideas I had, but they just wanted cloud services to do stupid garbage for them instead of learning.
I guess they were more of power-cloudists, not technologists.
But making libraries better is not exactly an unsolved problem, the only problem is the solution made libraries themselves mostly obsolete. E-book stores and online publications make libraries "S" - Superseded, and library books "E" - Elsewhere.
But it was interesting problem. Unlike normal libraries, they are so digital they run into a new problem: they have such little need for any books, they might as well throw all of them away. The medical education industry is so much more onboard with digital publishing and references because hospitals and schools pay top dollar, and often doctors will need research materials super fast when things are serious and they need to perform analysis quick. Digital publishing is not even a question of if, it is a long past when.
So long story aside, they had to be really secretive throwing away books. Someone once discovered these old, useless (no other schools want them, thus) in the garbage. Some alumni or concerned students found them, causing outrage.
Solution, this whole library spent years without an avenue for destruction of the books, because old grads and others would not tolerate the idea. How could we not need the books? Year later, dozens of racks exist with books and magazines not only never checked out, but not even touched for decades collecting significant dust.
Edit: For clarification: I know a lot of books still won't find anybody wanting them. But I say it's justified to throw them away after a period of time.
Unfortunately, that doesn't make it worthwhile to sell those books.
Lots of people treat libraries like holy places they supposedly value and the books are the holy artifacts. But these people are trying to overrule those who actually use these places. No one's life is made any better by their interference, but they get to be seen "standing up for the books."
(If I were to take the analogy further, it's like the people who only attend church on Easter and Christmas telling the weekly church-goers how to run the church.)
* There are some really bad books out there.
Counter to what the post's author implies, almost all librarians hate destroying books[0]. But we have to do it almost every day, because most libraries accept donations and only a very small fraction of these donated books are appropriate for the collection[1]. Many libraries have book sales, or sell donated or weeded books online, either directly or through partners like Better World Books[2]. We quickly learn that some copies of some books, either because of their poor condition or because no one is interested in reading them, have to be recycled or destroyed. It's no fun, but there are no alternatives[3].
As the post's author mentions in the CREW discussion in her post, librarians make an enormous distinction between the 5,000th copy of a book that is held in some library collection somewhere[4] and the last few copies. It's possible that San Francisco Public Library knowingly destroyed the last copy, or one of the last known copies, of a title, or even multiple titles, but I would be surprised if that was a policy rather than a mistake. In general, libraries either have a place to store such copies or can find another library that will add it to its collection and put it into circulation or storage.
[0] http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2013/killing-sir-... [1] By appropriate, I'm talking about the book's physical condition and the likelihood that it will circulate enough to justify processing it and putting it on the shelf, because it is competing for that shelf space with thousands of other donations, plus the ~1M new books per year that we could buy and put on the shelf in its place. [2] http://www.betterworldbooks.com/ [3] Unfortunately, there are only so many places to donate books, and we give away as many as we can, and then some, to places that are interested in receiving donations. [4] https://www.worldcat.org/ is one place we look, though OCLC makes it prohibitively expensive for most small libraries to make their collections available in WorldCat: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2008/a-useful-amp...
I find this pretty sad. Seems the architect forgot what a library was for.
Good thing that has never happened. Snopes: That Sinking Feeling.
Discounting the urban legends about library architecture, there is some merit to giving your local library some uniqueness. I have seen far too many libraries with that "concrete bunker for giants" look to them, and it doesn't make me want to go in and read the books. It probably doesn't do much to support "friends of the library" donations, either.
And in the future, the server racks will take up less space anyway, even with the cooling and the network antennas.
My point is, libraries need room for a lot more than books. We love books; that's pretty much a prerequisite for becoming a librarian, but we do a lot more for the people in your community, which is why libraries hire architects who understand that libraries fulfill different needs for different people.
[0] http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/how-well-are...
Kind of pisses me off.
edit: not the digitizing part, just the artificially-scarce ebook loan.
Or is this something else the library does on its own?
Internet Archive's Open Library project[0] was doing something like this, and may still be, though I no longer see information about this program on its website. Participating libraries would ship a book to IA/OL, who would then scan it and pack away the original so no one could have access to it. IA/OL uses Adobe DRM software to make a copy of the work available digitally, either directly or through its partner libraries, though to only one person at a time. I've written about this process within the larger context of ebooks and DRM here: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-ca...
As I understand it, one of the precedents for Open Library's process was an allowance made for transitioning from legacy to supported platforms. If a library had an important work on a Betamax tape, and no one had Betamax players, it would be allowed to transfer that information to a VHS tape or a DVD or some other format that people could use, provided the library makes the original unavailable (IIRC, the library may even be expected to destroy the original), and only circulate the newly formatted copy with the restrictions that applied to the previous copy.
If you're interested in this topic and aren't a lawyer, I recommend Complete Copyright[1] by the American Library Association's Carrie Russell, along with anything by Mary Minnow[2].
[0] http://openlibrary.org/ [1] http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=2260 (also available at Amazon, etc.) [2] http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/
The scanning costs can be spread out by each public library sharing the scanned copies amongst themselves.
eBooks have issues of their own. Most of these seem to be due to the interface, though, rather than to the format itself. 3M Cloud, for example, seems dedicated to making it as difficult as possible for me to be able to pick up my eBook and continue reading where I left off. My current book drops me at the beginning of Chapter 2 every time I open in. It has a "bookmark" capability, by which I mean I can create a bookmark--I just can't ever find it later, much less return to the spot in the book that it supposedly marks. Frustrating. But I can download and start reading a book in the middle of the night, far from home, and when my checkout period expires, the local copy automatically disappears without my having to return to the library or pay a fine for failure to return the book.
I understand the need to get rid of unwanted books from a library; books are ming in, so naturally some books have to go out. What I find despicable is destroying those books rather than trying to find ways to people who would use them.
You can always sell those books on Amazon (I've seen libraries do it) but it basically requires a full time team to handle listings, sales, shipping, returns, etc.
There's value in preserving things, but some books are really really bad. I call those "Write only" books. You'll find tons of them if you browse the stack of any random library. It always makes me wonder about the author - does he realize no one at all will read his book?
Libraries aren't museums. They are for use by people who want to read books.
It took me a while to internalize this other rule: the median resale of used books is zero dollars. Once upon a time each physical copy of a book was a very rare item that represented hours of physical labor. These days it costs money to get rid of old books.
No one is waiting to read my old books.[1] They have sentimental value to me, but when I die the best I can hope for is that my kids get them into the recycle bin instead of the landfill.
[1] (Well, I have some of the original Wild Cards novels which are apparently out-of-print.)
My own definition of a weed is "a plant that thrives without assistance." For example, grass refuses to grow on my lawn without intensive assistance, but cannot be eradicated from places I don't want it to grow.
"Weeding, even in the garden, has become a remarkably controversial subject."
In many states, there is a published list of species that qualify as noxious or invasive. In the HOA busybody's mind, a weed is anything that is not the approved cultivar of grass and anything taller than 4 inches high. This disconnect is bound to cause some controversy somewhere.
I would think that with library card catalogs going electronic, a ranking algorithm could automatically establish a culling order for books, picking them off the bottom to be unbound and photographed or digitized, so that there is just enough shelf space made available for both the incoming books and the redundant storage backups.
After all, they were able to put periodicals on microfiche and thus store more of them, weren't they? There's no reason to trash anything if you can make its bits small enough.
http://www.doaks.org/resources/publications/doaks-online-pub...