Librarians tired of being accused of hiding secret books that were made up by AI

https://gizmodo.com/librarians-arent-hiding-secret-books-from-you-that-only-ai-knows-about-2000698176

by vitalnodo • 7 months ago

88 83 7 months ago

ggm• 7 months ago

Who knew Borges library of babel is just yield()

Librarians do hide books. But not as a way of hiding from public but as a way of not throwing them away. Let me explain. Even though libraries are very big still they run out of space and regularly throw out (in India because most don't care) / ( or in Texas sell out books cheaply) and it pains the librarians deeply so they kind of stash books secretly from being thrown away. And if you really show interest in a particular book and request it nicely then the librarian will give it to you and tell you not to tell anyone. Why I know this because it happened to me in my college library in India. I can still after decades remember the love of books on that librarian's face

WarOnPrivacy2• 7 months ago

Libraries remove unborrowed books and sell them. Borrowed books stay on the shelf. That's what they do with books.

Guestmodinfo2• 7 months ago

Judging books by their unborrowedness is like judging a youtube video's educational content by its view count. It's a bad reality created by the powers that be

pyuser583• 7 months ago

No it’s a lot more complicated than that …

Librarians try to “market” books based on what they think the public wants or needs.

They try to assure a variety of books put forward, with a special emphasis on “good for you” books.

Books deed as “not good for you” are likely to be shelved in the back.

in practice, libraries use the Dewey decimal system, but that excluded the many “exhibits” of “good for you” material.

I don’t mean “good for you” in a good or bad way. It’s simply what the librarian believes will be most helpful to the readers.

There are currently some very real and important controversies in public libraries that have no clear solution.

CJefferson2• 7 months ago

Almost every library regularly throws out books, and all librarians I know are happy with this. New books arrive regularly, and unless you plan on your library growing unlimited, you need to, in general, a 1 in 1 out policy.

nephihaha4• 7 months ago

They used to say that one of the chief roles of a librarian was to keep people away from books. There is a lot of truth in that.

k310• 7 months ago

I visited the local library (California foothills) during a “book sale”, and what didn’t sell was left out in boxes, either for cheap or free. What didn’t move was destined for the landfill. I was aghast, but without enough room to take in the strays. Real estate is unforgiving.

I am in favor of “little free libraries” [0] where books circulate freely, and if they aren’t returned, hopefully are read and not destroyed. They offer plans to build little libraries, and I hope to build some. “Owner” will have to build the supports, though.

[0] https://littlefreelibrary.org/

araes• 7 months ago

We have those around our town in a bunch of neighborhoods. Not sure on the usage rates, yet thought they were a pretty cool idea when I saw them, and they seem to always have books available (ie, not like they're just being taken and emptied)

JumpCrisscross3• 7 months ago

I am in favor of “little free libraries”

Do these work for kids' books? Whenever I've seen them geared towards adults, the content is absolute crap.

mschild• 7 months ago

You get of what you put in. (Sort of)

I had a lot of good books that I finished reading and wouldn't realistically touch again.

Whenever I went to browse for some books I would leave one of them in exchange. Over time, the quality went up because other people started doing the same.

To be honest, I did curate the available books at it as well. Obvious crap (self-published conspiracy theory stuff) was thrown out. At some point you will also have to simple throw out some old ones if they never get taken. Space is limited and a 50 year old book that is collecting dust is not useful to anyone.

kasey_junk• 7 months ago

It takes the right sort of library owner to curate the library and a community amenable to helping out. My wife runs our library and one thing she does is pulls out some books when the library is flush and puts them back in when it’s a little dry. But she works in the book industry so she also has a source of high quality books and knowledge about them.

She’s specifically a children’s book person, so we made sure our library could fit kids books (picture books are big). But many of the kits won’t.

We also live in a walkable college town. There are 5 libraries within 4 blocks of ours. Our neighbors take it upon themselves to clean up and donate. We came back from our Christmas break to someone having installed a motion activated light in the library!

So under the right conditions they work. But you know what works better? Professional librarians, with appropriate resources and facilities. But in all cases, free libraries, public libraries, research libraries, etc. deaccessioning is required so sad for the op, we throw books away.

dugmartin• 7 months ago

We have a small local company that takes bulk book (and cds, dvds, video games, vinyl records) donations. That company has couple of retail used bookstores and also sells both retail and wholesale online but, according to their owner, most of what they get is sold for pulp.

My wife is an elementary school reading teacher and runs a yearly family book night where she takes book donations she gets all year and fills a bunch of portable tables in the gym with kids (and adult) books that are free for the taking. What is left over is taken (by me) to that local company and dumped in huge bins. If you are looking to get rid of a bunch of books I'd also suggest contacting your local schools to see if they take donations.

tgv• 7 months ago

These free book shelves are no substitute for a real library, are they? In my experience, the offering is really limited. It's nice for a random find, but that's all. It's tough that books get burned, but if nobody wants to read them, there's no alternative.

b112• 7 months ago

Everyone had loads of books at home 50 years ago. Now far, far fewer homes have books.

They don't all have a home anymore.

Sad, but that's where we're at. It's not book burning in the traditional meaning, wven if that's what is happening.

wccrawford3• 7 months ago

My wife runs one locally. She's pretty happy with it, but I have to bite my tongue when talking about it with her.

People frequently take all the good books, all at once, and don't return them.

Someone just emptied out half of it yesterday, and I don't even think they were picky. They just took a whole shelf of books.

It's such a crappy thing to do, and there's nothing that can be done to stop the bad actors.

nephihaha4• 7 months ago

Bad actors? Bad readers surely.

The trick is to plump up such a library with a few books no one will take. Cheap romances etc.

devilbunny2• 7 months ago

A lot of the bad actors are scanning prices on them and selling them. Deface the title page and inside covers and they will be fine to read but worth almost nothing at sale. A stamp saying "Taken from the Little Free Library of X. Share and enjoy. Please report sellers." would do the job.

squigz• 7 months ago

I hate to be cynical, but that's always been my first thought with those too, and that just sucks...

I really like devilbunny's idea of a cute little stamp though! It probably wouldn't stop very determined people, but would probably deter a lot.

shayway• 7 months ago

I'm sorry to hear that.

Where I live actually has the opposite; there are ~6 within a mile, and they're usually completely full. People are always dumping huge collections into them, to where I never even have the chance to give back myself.

I don't know what makes it different here. But it is possible for them to work without safeguards.

gglitch• 7 months ago

Libraries’ resources are not infinite, therefore most of them are explicitly optimized for circulation, not preservation. If they’re allocating valuable shelf space and staff time on something no one is using, they’re misallocating resources. You know what makes librarians’ hearts warm up? For people to use their spaces, collections, and services.

toomuchtodo• 7 months ago

Little free libraries are fantastic when possible. With that said, assuming the final disposition will be a landfill or pulping via recycling, as a last resort the Internet Archive will accept for scanning and long term cold storage books they have not yet archived. They have an app available to scan UPC codes or OCR ISBNs to dedupe.

https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a...

Books that have been scanned can be shipped using the below info.

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

(no affiliation)

estimator7292• 7 months ago

I've actually worked in libraries. Public libraries are not historic archives preserving knowledge in perpetuity. You want an academic or research library.

Public libraries are nothing more than a group-buy scheme. Everyone throws tax money in the pot and the library buys books and media for everyone to use. Since one can't fit infinite physical objects in a finite space, the collection must be continually pruned and curated. Library systems track circulation figures and unpopular works get weeded.

In my case, weeded books go on the $.50 shelf. If they stay there they go to a different organization for bulk sale, or eventually trashed.

The harsh reality is that there is an almost infinite number of books. The vast majority of which will never be lasting or consequential works. Nobody needs a copy of a 1998 vampire smut thriller, and the world is not worse off for destroying your copy.

Librarians do, however, try to keep notable and important works in the collection regardless of circulation. Some books, but only some, are important enough to stick around forever, and in large part they do.

Libraries only get rid of materials that aren't being used and which take up space for materials that will be used. The goal isn't to preserve knowledge, it's to allow every citizen the same access to knowledge and entertainment as their neighbors. It's to use your population's limited resources to procure the most needed/desired materials for their money. They're optimizing accessibility and foot traffic because that's their purpose.

True archival happens elsewhere

maxerickson• 7 months ago

Take joy in abundance.

zippyman55• 7 months ago

Libraries are overwhelmed in their inability to store all the "good" books. I was cleaning out my book collection of, what I thought are really good books, but I came to the realization there is no space for them. So, they get sold or pulped.

the-mitr• 7 months ago

this is a good example of what a post-truth world looks like.

JumpCrisscross3• 7 months ago

Original source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-slop-is-spurri...

sajb• 7 months ago

This seems to have a simple solution - if you can't find any reference to a particular book by googling its title, then it likely does not exist.

wakawaka282• 7 months ago

It depends on the title. Many titles are difficult to search for.

Krasnol• 7 months ago

The problem is that this solution runs counter to what is expected from AI customers today: subscribe and turn off your brain.

(Yes, I know about the phrases written below every singe one of them. They're probably being taken just as seriously as ToS.)

nephihaha4• 7 months ago

You have too much faith in Commissar Google. I know of numerous books which don't appear on Google. Likely the tip of the iceberg.

khalic• 7 months ago

Ah Gizmodo, always the paragon of good journalism. The person has explicitly asked her tweets not be used in external websites, and of course this zombie tabloid doesn't give a damn

AndrewDucker• 7 months ago

The post they quoted is the one that's marked as "do not share".

nkrisc5• 7 months ago

It’s a request, and requests may be denied or ignored.

If they cared, they wouldn’t post publicly or the service would not allow that message to embedded.

An enforceable request is called a “demand”, and unless you’re actually capable of enforcing it, it is in fact still just a request.

It would have been polite to honor the request, but they are under no obligation to do so.

Don’t make public posts if you don’t want them publicly displayed.

cl0ckt0wer• 7 months ago

To paraphrase, you're not wrong, you're just a jerk.

llm_nerd2• 7 months ago

Do not read this comment.

Wait...you're still reading, defying my T&Cs!

The tag to not display on external websites is up to Bluesky to enforce. I mean, you understand those Bluesky chirps or whatever are literally being served by Bluesky, right?

throawayonthe2• 7 months ago

it is being 'enforced' by the bsky embed, the post not shown is the quoted one: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile...

throawayonthe2• 7 months ago

The person who has that setting is the user being quoted, not the top-level post; the bluesky is indeed blocking that post in question, so it isn't appearing on Gizmodo

See here :https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile...

zenethian• 7 months ago

You didn’t click into it, did you? The top level post did not have that restriction, but instead the post it replies to does. Go look.

The actual message in the bsky widget could be improved to state that the label is masking the original post and not the reply.

Daub• 7 months ago

Of course, what we need now is for someone to store those books. A book being catalogued before it has been written - a cool idea.

lkramer• 7 months ago

it shows there is a demand!

markus_zhang• 7 months ago

Ah they are hiding Necronomicon again.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 7 months ago

To be fair, the original title was Azathoth Traditional Cooking, by Chef Abdul, and is often listed under "Domestic Arts."

ChrisMarshallNY2• 7 months ago

I wonder if lawyers will try to sue law libraries that don't have hallucinated case histories.

63282836292919• 7 months ago

I had hoped that Gawker rag was finally shut down for good.

WillAdams2• 7 months ago

A library which was known for having a "last policy" system in place, should not have this difficulty. I would further argue that any library should be willing to accept a copy of any book which they do not have and safely store it until someone wishes to borrow it. I'm still salty that I had to buy a copy of Glenn Reid's _Thinking in PostScript_ when a local library discarded it from their stacks (there are other books which I would check out semi-regularly which have also been discarded which I also need to purchase, but missed seeing on their "discarded" table or at the annual library sale).

Yes, this would require better funding, and yes, I regularly donate to my local library every year.

yesfitz2• 7 months ago

Not sure if you've already explored this avenue, but you can usually request media that your library doesn't have through the interlibrary loan[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlibrary_loan

WillAdams2• 7 months ago

Yes, but the principle here is that a library (system) should function as a repository for physical embodiments of knowledge, and should not be discarding books.

We're going through this at my workplace as well, converting from cubicles to an open floor plan, so workspaces which had decades of accumulated books are being cleared out --- I've rescued as many as I can justify from the recycling bin, but that's a tiny portion, so I'm feeling this sort of decision quite viscerally.

wccrawford3• 7 months ago

The "magic" of why AI is trusted over humans is that so many humans are terrible at their jobs that people default to not trusting someone who is telling them something they don't want to hear.

The AI always tells them what they want to hear, and so they trust it. It's not magic.

lapcat• 7 months ago

so many humans are terrible at their jobs

Is there any empirical evidence that librarians are terrible at their jobs?

The reason is not the supposed fallibility of humans but rather the supposed infallibility of technology. Nontechnical people don't know how the technology works, don't know how the sausage is made, and they mistakenly assume it can't go wrong, just like a calculator can't go wrong.

Also, people are not good at revising their beliefs. A lot depends on what they hear first, and they usually hear from the internet before they hear from an expert, because it's easier and faster to consult the former. It's embarrassing to admit to yourself that you were suckered into believing something false, so the emotional coping mechanism is to get angry at the person who contradicts your beliefs, which preserves your self-respect.

faidit• 7 months ago

Quick, someone found a startup called Vibrary and hire vibrarians (I mean, spin up some agentic tablets on wheels) to generate these books on demand for people who request them, working backwards from the halluci-citations. Lawyers will love it! Forgeries were common for thousands of years after all. The last few hundred years of "truth" was a glitch waiting to be patched.

josefritzishere• 7 months ago

AI is complete garbage. It is so tiring that anyone sees any potential in this absurdly expensive trash heap of code.

rich_sasha• 7 months ago

On another "news" website, a ring of librarians hiding secret books sentenced to death by US prime minister and both presidents.

thrill• 7 months ago

“The citation seems to have been included in many lower quality papers—likely due to laziness and sloppiness rather than an intent to deceive.”

Yeah … no. If you use a citation and you didn’t read the article yourself then it is absolutely intentional deception, and it should be treated as such.

Librarians tired of being accused of hiding secret books that were made up by AI

Related Stories