
Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons - r721
http://boingboing.net/2017/01/02/automated-book-culling-softwar.html
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sheraz
Good story. I completely agree that all of this auto-curation will bury the
eclectic collections and poison discovery.

That is one big reason I started my side project, curabase.com[1], to simply
enable anyone to curate their own list of bookmarks. (Not a new idea, but it
is MY idea based on this singlular thought -- that human curation will always
be better, and NO. I don't have data to back it up :-)

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bmer
But human curation can be bought/influenced. So, in your system, influential
curators could be influenced by advertisers to display certain links in their
list of bookmarks?

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sheraz
sure. And good for them. The curator risks his own reputation by promoting
sponsors with poor content, products, or services that are not relevant to the
audience.

I don't mind advertising/marketing so long as it is relevant and timely.

~~~
bmer
That's assuming the payments were to include something in the list. Influence
can also work the other way: take something off of a list.

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sheraz
yeah so what. that is the privilege of having power, you can exchange it for
other forms of power.

And again, credibility is at stake. If I curate a list of awesome cloud
providers, and IBM pays me to exclude AWS, then I look like an idiot.

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sohkamyung
Side note: Cory Doctorow mentions "Bellwether" by Connie Willis in the
article. Worth reading. See also his review of it [1]

[1] Bellwether: Connie Willis's classic, hilarious novel about the science of
trendiness [ [https://boingboing.net/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-
williss-...](https://boingboing.net/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-
williss-c.html) ]

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thefastlane
wow, the librarian was fired over trying to _keep_ books in the library.
sounds like a deleted scene from Idiocracy.

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x1798DE
Says he was suspended, not fired. Also, he was deliberately messing with their
metrics. Presumably they want to sell or otherwise discard books that no one
is checking out in favor of ones that have useful and relevant information. By
pretending that the ones no one cares about are actually popular, you're
preventing the library from acquiring books that people actually _want to
read_.

Their metrics may be flawed, but it's not like all discarding of books is a
bad idea.

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thefastlane
good call, thanks for clarifying the librarian was suspended, not fired.

But you create a false dichotomy between books no one checks ou' and books
with useful and relevant information. if a book doesn't get checked out for,
say, a year, is that an indication that it contains no useful information? on
what basis?

i'd go further and say this is not a case of flawed metrics but flawed
ideology. i don't want my tax dollars to fund the book-equivalent of redbox. i
want my tax dollars to fund the preservation and archiving and availability of
knowledge, regardless of how 'popular' an algorithm says it is.

granted, a library cannot hold infinite books. but i'd take the curation of a
librarian over an algorithm any day of the week.

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x1798DE
It's not a false dichotomy, I'm saying that some books need to be culled and
that they need to make decisions about it. One of the metrics they have to use
to make those decisions is what is being checked out and, like I said,
regardless of how they _use_ the metrics, this guy was _manipulating them_. It
would be better if he made the argument that they shouldn't use the metric
than to just manipulate the metric into doing what he wanted.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'm guess that, like me, he's appalled that a _library_ should choose to
discard useful books on the basis of popularity. I'd manipulate goofy metrics
like hell to preserve the collection too. Else you end up with a popular-
culture library with a memory of a year or so. Instead of a true library.

All that's been said. I'm just agreeing with the strategy to defy the
Philistines at all costs. The librarian was a hero.

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ezoe
A good plot idea for dystopian novel.

