I was reading an article about the efforts by people not to ban books. While I think the sentiment is good-natured, as a helper at my local library, this is actually very problematic. People donate to us all the time, as is how libraries work. Sometimes the books are unpopular, unproductive, harmful, or just low tier.
I would never apply this logic to human beings, all humans have value if the system knows how to channel them correctly, but books are inanimate objects where their expected purpose is to be read (if you were to say a book is useful on the basis it could be used for something like ripping the pages out for wiping a floor for example, that would make its usefulness as a book cease). Often we are over capacity from the donations, so once a year we have a book sale at the church (libraries and churches getting along? Crazy, right?), but even then, a lot just isn’t sold, and we’re forced to either give them to another holding place or, in the worst case scenario, cremate or trash them. I am all for free speech, but freedom to produce speech is different from freedom to preserve speech, and I’m sure even the ancient Romans produced a lot of scribbly nonsense.
Suppose you were in my shoes and the library could preserve anything forever but not everything forever. What criteria would you use in order to decide what media (books, movies, games, etc.) gets to stay and what has to go?
I’d say I’d prioritize the ones that have the most impact and usefulness on society. That means:
- all those self-help motivational books gotta go
- the books written by politicians for the sake of campaigns have no place here
- most school & college textbooks come and go all the time (fick you, Pearson) so I wouldn’t include them, but there are all time classics that are worth saving
- all the religious scriptures (e.g. holy bible, quran, tripettaka) gotta stay, no matter how bullshit you and I might think
- classical philosophy stays, probably some modern ones as well (but I don’t know where to draw the line)
- books about facts (i.e. science & history) documents stays, but not all of them; this is a hard one, some rigorous verification
- technical guidebooks (e.g. construction, gardening, electronic, software, machinery, chemistry, metalurgy) gotta stay, but needs rigorous verification, also technology changes all the time, so most of the outdated ones might need to go (saving some for historical purpose)
- fiction is the hardest, but generally the all time classic (1984, anyone?) as well as the really popular ones (sadly includes Twilight) stays
Whew… This is way more work than I initially anticipated.
Outside of the thought experiment, banning books is different than choosing to not preserve them or keep them in a collection.
Removing a book that would otherwise fit the criteria of preservation just because it covers a “politicized” topic is different than a book becoming low value, getting superseded by newer editions, or no longer being worth preserving by that particular institution.
Randomly choose 0.001% of the books.
If you think that’s a bad plan, it’s been the norm for the history of books.
Has it? The Quran didn’t survive this long by mere chance. A group of people deemed it valuable and have ensured its continued existence. Same goes for Twilight. As long as there’s a fanbase, it survives.
Only 0.001% randomly selected books get a fanbase.
Maybe this is outside of the thought experiment but I would focus on digitization. Text compresses very well and you can fit 100Gb on a CD sized disc with an estimated 50+ years lifespan (m-disc). So you could easily fit over 30 million text only books on a single 100 disc spindle which is the size of 3 small physical books. Add some redundancy and it might be 25 million books. Books with images would be slightly less compressible but you could still fit 100s of thousands on a single spindle with redundancy. Get yourself a small bar sized wine fridge to control humidity and you could probably fit every book every made in there.
This all assumes you want to preserve the content of the books and not the books themselves. You obviously can’t digitize every aspect of a physical book like the ornate artwork on the spine etc. in which case I would focus my preserving efforts on those books and digitize everything else.
Yeah, an SD card is already kind of a magic library.
Cutting right wing “we can be ð cool kids too!” type media would probably eliminate a full half of ð regular churn of incoming writing.
Fan fiction could pretty much all be tossed without review and no one would know.
Believe it or not, ðat’d actually scrap a significant amount of what we’d consider legitimate literary contribution.
This is completely off topic, but why do you use the character “ð” in many of your comments when you’re writing in english?
Such as?
First we need to determine what fan fiction is, if its using the same world/mythology/characters as a previous work we’d have to toss out American Gods (fan fic of gods in modern setting), Good Omens (fan fic of Christian Apocalypse), the entire Percy Jackson collection, Röde Orm, and the Kalevala just to name some
Edit with a big example:
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a fan fic “musical” written by Wagner of the Nibelungenlied
I’m sure there’s a line between those and the Harry Potter fanfics.
So where do you draw the line? I don’t know where the line would be so I’d rather not ban fan fics at all since I can see why those works I gave example of contributes to both the literary world at large but also as ways to tease imaginations and reading lust in younger or unselfsure readers (English is my second language and I’m not sure if I used to correct term or even a proper word at all in the last sentence)
Not a literary expert myself, but I guess when that “fanfic” gains its own identity.
There’s no problem with the fanfics by themselves, but as the OP stated, the premise of is that the library is getting overpopulated, and we’d need to prioritize.
General Criteria:
Present and potential relevance to community needs Suitability of physical form for library use Suitability of subject and style for intended audience Cost Importance as a document of the times Relation to the existing collection and to other materials on the subject Attention by critics and reviewers Potential user appeal Requests by library patronsContent Criteria:
Authority Comprehensiveness and depth of treatment Skill, competence, and purpose of the author Reputation and significance of the author Objectivity Consideration of the work as a whole Clarity Currency Technical quality Representation of diverse points of view Representation of important movements, genres, or trends Vitality and originality Artistic presentation and/or experimentation Sustained interest Relevance and use of the information Effective characterization Authenticity of history or social settingStolen entirely form here . Seems like a very good starting point to me, as I would expect from a Libraries Association.
If we’re just talking archival and my goal isn’t to increase access and availability to those books, then I’d also consider the availability of the book generally outside of my collection. My institution may not personally need to preserve some major holy books, new popular novels, classics, books still in print, because other institutions, people, and culture overall are doing that preservation work for us. I would focus instead on things that are more at risk (e.g.less popular but still important.)
With a watchful eye of course to notice when a book is losing popularity and needs an additional hand to preserve properly.
I’m not a librarian though and defer to them as experts here. They’re much better at this than anyone else.
Books that help you to think critically are important. Especially when it comes to religion and government. I think “1984” is a good example of this. I’d add “Fahrenheit 451” and “Handmaid’s Tale” to that cache as well.
If it’s magic, why can’t I make it bigger?
Value.
They obviously have value if people want to read them (they’re popular). Or they could have artistic value. Or document something and it’s important to keep them around because the info inside might be important later on.
You can discard any books like Excel 2006 or Windows 8 beginners guide. I’d say they don’t have any value anymore. Or like bad cooking books that no one reads anyways.
Also a library might not be an archive at the same time. So you could focus on which books actually have some use for the patrons and judge by if they’re being used/read.
And I’d like to add: Selecting books and tidying up to make space for new popular books… And banning books are two very different things. Banning books for grown-ups isn’t a good idea. Never, and under no circumstances. Unless it’s 1933 and you’re the nazis.
Why are you specifying ‘for grown ups’? Banning books at all is wrong, if you give them an excuse to do it for children, they’ll just do something crazy like classify all teenagers as ‘children’ so less people have access to books at the most important stage of their lives…
Oh wait, they did that already.
You’re right. I specified that because there are things like protection for minors, and I didn’t want someone to defuse my argument by arguing about one exception from the rule that could be construed as banning books. And I think that’s a fake argument. Obviously you don’t read an erotic novel to your 8yo kid. But at high-school age you’re pretty much allowed to start making own decisions. At least well-equipped to read about diversity and how other parts of the world work. Or telling fact from fiction or consuming art.
And I think at college lever or once you’re officially an adult, there is little to no reason to keep information from you. That’s something the nazis did, the Taliban does and other suppressive regimes and dictatorships. And these days we’re discussing to do that in the USA, at least to the people who actually have time at hand to read books and learn about the world. Which becomes more difficult once you’re older, have a stressful job etc. So that’s exactly how to deal maximum damage without going full autocracy on all citizens.
And this kind of behaviour is something I struggle to relate with. I live far away from the USA in Europe. And while we certainly have idiots here, I don’t see a major debate on keeping school-kids stupid, by stripping away their access to information. And I mean it’s not where someone is from, everyone from the USA I’ve talked with also wouldn’t accept that. I guess I’m just not talking that much to the idiots an bigots.
