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).<p>Yes, this would require better funding, and yes, I regularly donate to my local library every year.
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
It’s a request, and requests may be denied or ignored.<p>If they cared, they wouldn’t post publicly or the service would not allow that message to embedded.<p>An enforceable request is called a “demand”, and unless you’re actually capable of enforcing it, it is in fact still just a request.<p>It would have been polite to honor the request, but they are under no obligation to do so.<p>Don’t make public posts if you don’t want them publicly displayed.
The post they quoted is the one that's marked as "do not share".
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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://littlefreelibrary.org/" rel="nofollow">https://littlefreelibrary.org/</a>
My wife runs one locally. She's pretty happy with it, but I have to bite my tongue when talking about it with her.<p>People frequently take all the good books, all at once, and don't return them.<p>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.<p>It's such a crappy thing to do, and there's nothing that can be done to stop the bad actors.
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.<p>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.
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.
> <i>I am in favor of “little free libraries”</i><p>Do these work for kids' books? Whenever I've seen them geared towards adults, the content is absolute crap.
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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.
You get of what you put in. (Sort of)<p>I had a lot of good books that I finished reading and wouldn't realistically touch again.<p>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.<p>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.
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)
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
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.
Libraries remove unborrowed books and sell them. Borrowed books stay on the shelf. That's what they do with books.
No it’s a lot more complicated than that …<p>Librarians try to “market” books based on what they think the public wants or needs.<p>They try to assure a variety of books put forward, with a special emphasis on “good for you” books.<p>Books deed as “not good for you” are likely to be shelved in the back.<p>in practice, libraries use the Dewey decimal system, but that excluded the many “exhibits” of “good for you” material.<p>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.<p>There are currently some very real and important controversies in public libraries that have no clear solution.
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
Depending on goal of library and possible value of book this seems reasonable enough process. If you have library with goal of sharing popular enough content, keeping the popular books and removing truly unpopular that do not have significant value seems reasonable.<p>Unlike digital world where storage is cheap, in physical world it is limited. Thus focus on what the customers want is reasonable.<p>Archival libraries are different game. There keeping at least one copy is often reasonable.
> Judging books by their unborrowedness is like judging a youtube video's educational content by its view count.<p>I disagree with this. Libraries are notorious for being open about their processes; they will happily reveal flows of materials, down to the item.
Why have shelves full of books that haven’t been borrowed in 15 years? what benefit is that providing?
I once borrowed a book, to find a previous borrowers receipt in it, placed as a bookmark. Upon inspection it turned out that the previous borrower was myself(!) (I recognized the library card number), about ten years earlier.<p>So probably, no one had borrowed it in the time between. I was very happy the book had not been thrown out.
What you are saying is especially true for fiction, less so for nonfiction. Many nonfiction topics are important and require a large volume of materials to remain as reference. For example, you never know when it might be important to know how something was manufactured 50 years ago, or what happened in Congress 20 years ago, or what a newspaper reported a hundred years ago. This makes it really hard to judge which items could be culled. I'm inclined to agree that borrow rates are relevant but they are not the only thing that matters. The possibilities of digitization and interlibrary loan make culling less risky, but someone still has to decide to keep unpopular reference materials for them to remain available.
Ah they are hiding Necronomicon again.
To be fair, the original title was <i>Azathoth Traditional Cooking</i>, by Chef Abdul, and is often listed under "Domestic Arts."
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.
The problem is that this solution runs counter to what is expected from AI customers today: subscribe and turn off your brain.<p>(Yes, I know about the phrases written below every singe one of them. They're probably being taken just as seriously as ToS.)
It depends on the title. Many titles are difficult to search for.
I wonder if lawyers will try to sue law libraries that don't have hallucinated case histories.
I had hoped that Gawker rag was finally shut down for good.
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.
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.
Original source: <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-slop-is-spurring-record-requests-for-imaginary-journals/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-slop-is-spurri...</a>
Who knew Borges library of babel is just yield()
this is a good example of what a post-truth world looks like.