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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
