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A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

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Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#121

Post by jswelker »

I was a real university librarian for a decade. Most of the books they throw away are truly garbage. Yes some libraries take it too far with "weeding" too much, but it is necessary:

1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said purpose might not be secured) 2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff much harder 3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing

Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#122

Post by dredmorbius »

anigbrowl wrote: post #57
Ekaros wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because there is demand. Could be that there was very deep waiting list at some point. Or there has been deep waiting list for specific author before. Fulfilling these demands does require multiple copies or it could take years for people to get popular book.

Sorry, I don't think popularity should be a factor in library decision-making. Extremely popular books driven by massive marketing campaigns predictably translate into the same book being available for only a few dollars months later. This all sounds like it's driven much more by the needs of publishers than library users; consider that the more reduced the selection, the fewer people will come to use the library bec…

Yours seems to be an unpopular opinion. Perhaps you could partner with Bertrand Russell: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13524206M/Unpopular_essays>.

I'm also reminded by an observation of the late Robert K. Merton, on latent vs. manifest functions. Originally coined in the context of sociology, but far more broadly applicable. In discussing these, Merton makes the perceptive observation that because latent functions are not immediately apparent, obvious, or significant, they represent a greater increment of knowledge and understanding than manifest functions, which are obvious, evident, easily understood and communicated, etc.

Popular works, or opinions, tend to be more accessible, yes. But they are also frequently a lower increment of knowledge or utility.

I too am pained by book and other information collections which pander to easy accessibility at a cost to insight and significance. That isn't to say that libraries should discount popularity at all, but I cringe when it seems to be the primary consideration.

By extension, other mass-context systems (markets, mass media, etc.) also tend toward minimum viable standards (often mis-stated as "least common denominator", problematic in several ways), and discount both long-term (non-obvious, non-apparent) benefits and costs.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#123

Post by dredmorbius »

ghaff wrote: post #97
reaperducer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I've done ILL in three major cities. The shortest time it took to get the books requested was 14 days. Some have taken over 60.

That seems like a very reasonable timeframe for a physical book. Certainly used to take longer than that to special-order something.

In 1897 the US Library of Congress moved off-site from the Capitol building to an adjacent property. A key concern of its patronage (Congress itself) was how long it would take to retrieve books from this remote location.

The annual Librarian's letter details the results: an unannounced test of five arbitrarily-selected works was made via pneumatic tube (later supplemented with a telephone), and the requested works arrived within 10m5s, 8m11s, 10m, and with the longest delay, 12 minutes from receipt of the request.

See p. 7 of the annual Librarian's Report: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735044&vi...>.

One would hope that 2026 technolgies would be capable of results within at least the same order of magnitude, even at a greater physical separation.

One of my tremendous disappointments of today's Internet is the haste with which it delivers drek, but the reluctance with which it provides useful information, often for utterly outdated concerns with copyright. I'll note that HathiTrust itself, here the source of what was originally a public-domain US government publication, well outside any possible extant of copyright, still only permits one-page-at-a-time downloading of the original document.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#124

Post by bentley »

ceayo wrote: post #56
LaGrange wrote: post #11

Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books. It’s one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism manifests.

Without books, what books are they going to read?

Other books that are checked out often enough to justify the library keeping them.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#125

Post by WalterBright »

WillAdams wrote: post #20
fhdkweig wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?'

> That is what deep basement storage is for.

That's what scanned books are for. Didn't google already scan them all? And then the book publishers shut that down?

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#126

Post by lgvld »

bastawhiz wrote: post #10

My 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,…

Anyone remember this story about two librarians (hackers?) accused of creating fake borrowers in order to prevent books from being weed out? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/06/florida-librar...

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#127

Post by bentley »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #61
sailfast wrote: post #33

What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.

DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and vault knowledge until c…

DRM wouldn’t be a problem if it were unambiguously legal to break it and if copyright durations weren’t so ridiculously long. I have free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and so on, except for that last 95‐year chunk. There needs to be an appetite for copyright reform to extend and make permanent DMCA exemptions and to reduce copyright terms.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#128

Post by dredmorbius »

SMV279438 wrote: post #12

I 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…

I had the experience at uni in the 1980s of seeing the film The Last Emperor, which at one point includes a bit where a Time Magazine photographer is present. I realised that this probably meant that Time had run an item on the (then newly-crowned Japanese puppet) emperor Puyi of Manchukuo (occupied China).

So I headed to the campus library, serials room, which had bound volumes of Time along with many other publications, and shelf-scanned the appropriate date ranges around 1934 until I found the edition with the story. Read that, which was insightful (a question I'd had was whether or not Puyi was seen at the time as a puppet, and yes, he very much was).

I am fearful that this experience could not be replicated today, and that those stacks may well have been cleared.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#129

Post by rahimnathwani »

bastawhiz wrote: post #10

My 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,…

"If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days"

That means two trips to the library. And it means you can't use the book that same day. This is fine for fiction, but not if you want a book because you're going to study it to aid your learning or your work.

If it's fine for a book to arrive in a few days why have a library with publicly browsable shelves at all?

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#130

Post by cwmoore »

eutropia wrote: post #95
kelnos wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this part of the article made me sad: > a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals. What a waste! Sure, allowing something like this could (and probably would) be abused, but I think the waste is worse. I'm glad your middle school was able to do what they did!

I wonder if they could have transferred it to a separate nonprofit, and then that nonprofit has no restrictions on whom it is transferred or sold to?

One trick state legislatures hate!
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