Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books. It’s one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism manifests.
A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
11–20 of 181 posts
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#12I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing.
Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.
But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.
I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#13My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place. I used to work in a library,…
40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp "discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books were headed for the landfill.
I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the neutrino and particle physics.
Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#14My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place. I used to work in a library,…
And if you're lucky, your library may do frequent book sales!
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#15I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing. Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them. But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been…
Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items available on inter-library loan.
I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#16Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me. As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphon…
Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone, and my computer screen.
If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim if it were printed, too.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#17> the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books
Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#18At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#19I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them.
My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.
Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
#20My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place. I used to work in a library,…
40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp "discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books were headed for the landfill. I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book…
That is what deep basement storage is for.
A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark:
>What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'