| ▲ | Amezarak 9 hours ago |
| That’s because librarians have been making a concerted effort to “deaccession” (throw them into the dumpster or send them for pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters into ideological territory - old books might contain unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself. In some places it’s particularly absurd, for example, here’s one that had the school libraries junk anything written before 2008:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib... A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them. In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries. |
|
| ▲ | tbrownaw 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| From your article: > Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity." And step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity. When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate." For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners." So besides the "no old books" that was purportedly a misunderstanding is the official policy, there was also explicit ideological filtering. |
| |
| ▲ | hitekker 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yup, they employed intense scrutiny on books before 2008, followed by ideological filtering as you noted, resulting in empty library shelves. On that note, it's sad to see the GP downvoted for raising this uncomfortable truth. I guess "deaccessioning" or "weeding" reveals a certain hypocrisy among those who supposedly hate banning books. |
|
|
| ▲ | geerlingguy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's definitely a double edged sword. Librarians can plant seeds for thought and introspection. They can also wield the sword of censorship, hiding or discarding books they don't personally like, and fronting all the ones they do. |
|
| ▲ | AStonesThrow 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just a few days ago, I visited the community college library reference desk. We were discussing and browsing the shrinking stacks of reference volumes. I commented that some of these extant books must be kept because it was difficult to typeset or compile them electronically, and I pointed out a “Lakota language dictionary”... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me, and she said that electronic resources were great and fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue, because the Lady of the House is always right |
| |
| ▲ | trollbridge 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's something about that that simply sounds dangerous to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a certain resiliency in keeping printed copies of reference materials: they cannot be changed, disappeared (other than unloading them into the bin), or made impossible to access (unless the library starts putting books behind lock and key). If I want to learn about gardening (for example), I'd much rather get a reference text at the library than search for stuff online... which half the time is clickbaity or AI-generated trash. | | |
| ▲ | AStonesThrow 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not like the librarians have unilateral choice here. Old books on the shelves get vandalized and stolen; new books are not easy to come by, due to reduced print runs and supply-chain issues. How many times have we heard complaints about Amazon orders being "print-on-demand", and the quality is horrible? And if a published book is typeset in original PDF format anyway, why not distribute it that way to begin with? Librarians have the demand side to cope with too. Personally, I don't enjoy checking-out books from the library. They're heavy; they require a backpack to carry them; they're not ubiquitously available to me wherever I am; they need to be physically lugged back to the same place where I found them. So yeah, I'd rather have an eBook. But I contend (not in front of librarians) that a book such as a "Lakota Language Dictionary" is irreproducible in electronic form, because scholars have striven to compile those in print form; they developed new orthographies and documented the existing ones; and any new electronic-format dictionary must be recompiled, retypeset, and re-edited to satisfaction for a new publisher. So we won't have the same materials. I used to derive great joy from finding really old copies of the Vedas, or a Navajo dictionary, but mostly Hindu texts in the original scripts. And yeah, they were painstakingly compiled by British colonisers and oppressors. But that history is preserved because of those colonists having a scholarly interest in "Hindooism". And those Vedic texts, and Panini's grammar, will not be directly transcribed to eBooks. They may take photographic images of them and shove them into a PDF, but those volumes will be given short shrift, because they're all Public Domain anyway. The money's in stuff that you can copyright and IP that you can defend. And that's where libraries and librarians are going to follow. | |
| ▲ | Amezarak 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, you don't need to think too hard about this when sites like archive.org are in legal danger, and the dream of Google Books is dead. I had not considered the "everything on the Internet is AI/SEO slop now" - that's a good point too: even if the stuff exists online, it's often almost impossible to find. A few months ago I half-remembered a quote from a famous philosopher. Google and Bing returned only the vaguest, most useless search results - basically assuming I didn't actually want the quote, but general information about the philosopher. So then I turned to ChatGPT, which asserted that no such quote existed, but here were ones "like it" (they weren't.) Finally I skimmed through all the books I had until I located it. |
| |
| ▲ | tbrownaw 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe you can't get all the nice semantic benefits of marked-up plaintext, but there's still always the .tiff option. |
|
|
| ▲ | hx8 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself. I think you might be missing that there are many different types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents. |
| |
| ▲ | Amezarak 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yet these same local libraries used to be filled with the sorts of books I'm talking about. They threw them away to replace them with DVDs of Marvel movies, the worst dreck imaginable in the children's section, and shelves and shelves of the latest romance and mystery novels, along with whatever "hot" ghostwritten politics book is out. Frankly, I look at that is abandoning their original mission and no longer feel inclined to support them in any way. Libraries should have led their communities as centers and sources of learning. What we have now is something else wearing libraries as a skinsuit, and I don't see why libraries like this deserve public support as a library. But at any rate, as I said, the problem is not limited to municipal libraries, it's ongoing even at institutional libraries. |
|
