When will librarians start to throw offline literature away?

http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2015/12/26/when-will-the-librarians-start-to-throw-offline-literature-away/

by wyclif • 11 years ago

31 44 11 years ago

Libraries purge books literally all the time, and have been for years. Forex: http://awfullibrarybooks.net

wyclif• 11 years ago

They do, but the OP isn't talking about purging awful Whitney Houston books or old WordPerfect manuals from the '80s. He's talking about the tipping point when libraries decide it isn't worth keeping print copies of valuable works around because they've been digitized. We haven't reached that tipping point yet.

ghaff• 11 years ago

No, but this sort of question was very much a part of the controversial New York Public Library renovation plans. [1] It was/is a complex project with a lot of moving parts but certainly part of it revolved around the number of books to store, how accessible they would be, and how optimized their storage conditions.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-new-york-publ...

w8rbt• 11 years ago

Would there be an archive of the original books stored somewhere like the seed vault in Norway? It seems having one would be a good thing.

sciurus• 11 years ago

Many libraries already purge books that aren't online, as long as they can borrow the book from another library if a patron requests it.

grendelt• 11 years ago

So if all libraries adopt the mentality "well, someone else will have it", then who will actually have it?

Also, HN folks, the system of InterLibrary Loans is shockingly driven by manually searching other libraries. There's no system that allows you to automatically find books from other libraries based on metrics of cost of postage or physical distance. Some enterprising HN reader should work on a better ILL system that libraries don't know they need.

m52go• 11 years ago

I believe that's the purpose of the Harvard Depository:

http://library.harvard.edu/access-services-2/depository

geographomics• 11 years ago

skywhopper• 11 years ago

Some purging of books happens regularly at most libraries. But this advice to rush into the digital world is dangerous because some administrators take it too seriously: see the Urbana public library purge of 2013 when the administrator insisted on removing all nonfiction books published more than 10 years ago (http://bookriot.com/2013/06/21/bookgate-when-urbana-free-lib...). That's blatantly outrageous behavior, but it's the sort of thing unthinking government officials might insist on when they read simplistic arguments arguing that paper books are worthless, too expensive to keep, that librarians have no value when "everything is online" (in fact, librarians become ever more valuable as the volume of available material increases), and that library books, buildings, and staff are expendable wastes.

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

Why the emphasis on government ? I have heard this argument from the private sector as well. And louder.

design-of-homes• 11 years ago

Many of us assume everything is mostly online and so it's our first port of call for any research or knowledge gathering. But I think many people underestimate how much information in books isn't online and just how much useful information is still tied up in those books. Your example of Urbana public library, for example, shows how dangerous it is to wrongly assume that non-fiction books past a certain age must be out-of-date and therefore useless.

Here's a repeat of an anecdote that I've posted before in similar threads: a few years ago I was researching the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. I wanted to find out about his famous housing complex called Unité d'habitation (Housing Unit) first built in Marseille in France. I started my research online looking for floorplans and commentary or critques. I found very little (there is a lot more available online today, but not when I was looking).

Consider that Le Corbusier is one of the most famous architects of the 20th century so this was a surprise. Eventually, I did find what I was looking for by...(yes, you guessed it) going to the library and visiting an architecture exhibition. I ended up scanning some floorplans from a book (and putting them online). From the exhibition, I came across a video of Corbusier talking about the Unité d'habitation - a great find, and I ended up transcribing sections of that interview. None of this information was available on the web.

It's very easy to fall into the belief that the information you find online is likely to be the best or most recent information available on that topic - so the thought of further offline research at a library never crosses your mind. But there is a huge amount of information and knowledge found in books that has never made it online. If you never go to the library, you simply won't realise what you're missing.

1123581321• 11 years ago

North of Urbana, Rockford Public Library did a similar aggressive book purge in 2012. The counter-balancing growth of digital services was not enough to compensate. It turned out to be a part of a weird campaign by the executive director to get the public to see the main building as inadequate for a modern library. The director has since been forced to resign and the new director is pursuing an operations model that has more respect for print.

The purge had support from people who reflexively promote an optimistic use of ebooks. It's important to remember that the digital-vs-print debate can be exploited to accomplish goals that have little to do with any kind of reading.

sitkack3• 11 years ago

My community college had activist librarians that would purge books that were critical of the government and capitalism, but they would do it be between quarters so that students and faculty wouldn't see it.

The discard book section would have whole swaths of subject matter for the taking. I can only imagine how physical books are getting disappeared now that libraries have leases to ebook services.

I love ebooks, but they are in addition to, not a replacement of print books. Most books are no longer in print and are not available as an ebook. The physical archives are absolutely necessary.

petra• 11 years ago

> in fact, librarians become ever more valuable as the volume of available material increases

But we also have great tools to manage information, so now it becomes the classic battle of man vs machine and today , in order to be on top , you usually need to combine man and machine which requires a new type of librarian.

A lot of of this works is about attacking various angles of curation and book discovery, tagging books with more in-depth tags to allow better discoverability, giving book reviews, building better search engines , talking with users about books , etc.

But seeing this work mostly done by non traditional librarians, programmers and lay people, and rarely by librarians , i do wonder what role is left for traditional librarians.

theandrewbailey• 11 years ago

(in fact, librarians become ever more valuable as the volume of available material increases)

This cannot be overstated. It really hit me hard when I realized that Cloud Imperium (a video game developer, Star Citizen) has a librarian on staff.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherie-heiberg-15015859

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXsc_LYZf0I

restalis• 11 years ago

Hmm... What I first read in the title was "when the (computing) library-writers will cease writing offline (but still digital) versions of docs for their work?", which appears as a controverted claim to me. With "let's stop the anachronistic practice of using physical paper for information consumption", I agree.

romaniv• 11 years ago

A library without physical books is called a server.

VLM• 11 years ago

Its more a merger of museum and library, and you call them artifacts not books.

Think of plat maps and genealogical records from centuries ago. As a percentage of library artifacts, they'll increase over time.

Plenty of people will be "into" converting popular books. Then a smaller subset are into nation wide distributed but unpopular books. Then books not written in the local language or current language. Finally you end up with artifacts that are valuable to researchers but might only be read every century or so. Consider small town city council meeting records. Or church records of baptisms and funerals (and burials).

Aside from technological or economic collapse (good thing those two have never historically happened and therefore can never happen in the future...) the library of 2030 will be a lot like a museum is today, except perhaps more hands on. So you can walk into the genealogical room and its basically unchanged from 2015. Teen fiction, well, maybe that will be gone entirely. The concept of special collections or rare books will be eliminated because the only remaining books will either be special or rare.

What to do with all the space and salary is interesting. My suspicion is the days of 90%+ of American kids living less than 15 minutes walking distance from a public library are about to come to an end. I live in the county seat and have the largest public library, and probably every library in the county will eventually close and send all their genealogical artifacts to our formerly city now county library. We already have a small county historical society museum and I would not be surprised to see them merge with "the" county library.

Probably not a good decade to try to get a library science degree and become a librarian.

Interestingly there is a subculture that refuses to read off screens, even here, on an online on-screen discussion site, and that combined with very rapid printers and print on demand and ordering online means that bizarrely enough there might be more paper books in 2030 than in 2015, its just that cities won't pile so many up in one building. Much like the decline of public wells as a source of urban drinking water doesn't mean we've evolved past water drinking, it just means we have more faucets than mouths now, including faucets in our homes, so a neighborhood sharing a well seems weird and is basically culturally dead. Likewise in 2030 the idea of sharing a pile of books might feel icky, like a neighborhood sharing underwear or shoes does today.

fucking_tragedy4• 11 years ago

Reminder that relying on electronic books means your research and reading habits can be tracked and stored for later analysis.

Hope you aren't an anomaly, have interests / read material that could be used against you or are similar to whatever society thinks the boogyman du jour reads.

With the restrictions the Wassenaar Arrangement can set up, you'd be surprised how quickly many of your mundane professional interests will put you on the radar.

bluedino• 11 years ago

> Reminder that relying on electronic books means your research and reading habits can be tracked and stored for later analysis.

Libraries don't keep records? That's how the killer was caught in the film Seven

fucking_tragedy4• 11 years ago

How often do you check out reference material?

If you knew the material you were interested, say "alternative music"[0] might put you on a list, would you check the book out or try to stay off the library's inventory system?

With electronic books, browsing is checking out is an expressed interest in what can make you seem like a terrorist/spy/hacker/who knows to systems that are used to identify enemies of the state.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/25/radica...

asuffield• 11 years ago

Most libraries that I've used have logged every book that I accessed. It's how they detect (and thereby prevent) damage.

gohrt3• 11 years ago

They destroy those records shortly after you return the book, and fight government attempts to access those records.

fucking_tragedy4• 11 years ago

Even the books you pick off the shelf at your library? What about reference books?

SomewhatLikely• 11 years ago

As a researcher I read your first sentence and envisioned something much more positive than where you took it. Imagine being able to see a record of every page of every book a researcher looked at when putting together their own manuscripts. This would enable discovering gaps in knowledge, and could also serve as an extended bibliography that beyond just what was remembered and cited.

rquantz• 11 years ago

I can imagine this happening for most libraries, but considering that paper is a longer lasting medium than digital, I certainly hope there are a significant number of actual book libraries still peppering the landscape a generation from now.

WalterBright2• 11 years ago

Having lost a lot of books in a flood, I'm happier with digital copies I can make backups of.

sfk• 11 years ago

The process of creating cross links in one's mind that are actually still available when not staring at google.com works far better when in sitting in a library and reading actual books.

I think science (as opposed to hype like "big data") will progress faster again once the Internet goes out of fashion.

a3n• 11 years ago

Dangerous. We need books like we need seed archives, to reboot after a civilization's collapse. Electronic-only books would precede a very, very dark age.

sitkack3• 11 years ago

I imagine my kindle dx, loaded with 4GB of technical information being more important than any one person. Kinda like gasoline in mad max.

jefflinwood• 11 years ago

I was able to find an interesting report that compares e-book circulation to printed book circulation, along with a lot of other statistics and research.

http://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/LJS...

What I find more interesting is the changing role of the library as a physical institution, in particular as public libraries have crowded out internet cafes by providing free internet access. Does it still make sense for libraries to provide a large amount of floor space for books, or can that space be used better for more internet stations, more community space, more working areas, or other uses?

sitkack3• 11 years ago

I would hope in the future that libraries will provide planetarium like projection rooms for synthesizing multimedia experiences for doing research by providing access to information and singular solitude. Something like minority report along with intelligent agents that can read important summarization, overlay video, create timelines and interactive mind maps. A semantically coherent semiotic deep dream.

jtth• 11 years ago

Never, hopefully.

bholdr• 11 years ago

Vernor Vinge envisioned such future in his science fiction (for now) novel Rainbows End :)

"The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently), physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.

So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being so inaccessible before." -- Review by teleread http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/review-rainbows-end/

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

Vinge's description of that project seems to be rather directly inspired by Google's book scanning project -- in which universities were involved (including Vinge citing, as the motivation for the fictional project, a paraphrase of Google's corporate mission statement.)

thuuuomas• 11 years ago

IANAL, but it's worth noting that libraries have particular usage rights regarding printed materials that they give up entirely when moving to an ebook licensing scheme.

http://www.librarylaw.com/Copyright_and_Libraries.html

NvidiaCUDA• 11 years ago

I've scanned most of my books at home on a DIY book Scanner and/or a Fujitsu contactless scanner and then threw them away. (Many acquaintances of mine who don't value intellectual property were shocked that I threw books away, but I couldn't morally justify donating them or selling them if I retained a copy.)

I freed up a lot of space in the house, and now I can read anything anywhere.

Aardwolf2• 11 years ago

Hopefully never? If there are archeologists in a few thousands years, books will be a lot more useful than remains of harddrives

gohrt3• 11 years ago

what are they going to do with millions of books, if they are incapable of decoding hard drives

Aardwolf2• 11 years ago

study them, learn our script, do what historians do ...

WalterBright2• 11 years ago

Archivists and collectors have always been deciding what was worth keeping and what to toss. The digital revolution is not new in this regard.

mediasavvy• 11 years ago

Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker, is a remarkable discussion of what's lost when libraries destroy bound newspapers when they are "replaced" by microfilm.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gate...

When will librarians start to throw offline literature away?

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