
When will librarians start to throw offline literature away? - wyclif
http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2015/12/26/when-will-the-librarians-start-to-throw-offline-literature-away/
======
skywhopper
Some purging of books happens regularly at most libraries. But this advice to
rush into the digital world is dangerous because some administrators take it
too seriously: see the Urbana public library purge of 2013 when the
administrator insisted on removing all nonfiction books published more than 10
years ago ([http://bookriot.com/2013/06/21/bookgate-when-urbana-free-
lib...](http://bookriot.com/2013/06/21/bookgate-when-urbana-free-library-got-
rid-of-thousands-of-books/)). That's blatantly outrageous behavior, but it's
the sort of thing unthinking government officials might insist on when they
read simplistic arguments arguing that paper books are worthless, too
expensive to keep, that librarians have no value when "everything is online"
(in fact, librarians become ever more valuable as the volume of available
material increases), and that library books, buildings, and staff are
expendable wastes.

~~~
1123581321
North of Urbana, Rockford Public Library did a similar aggressive book purge
in 2012. The counter-balancing growth of digital services was not enough to
compensate. It turned out to be a part of a weird campaign by the executive
director to get the public to see the main building as inadequate for a modern
library. The director has since been forced to resign and the new director is
pursuing an operations model that has more respect for print.

The purge had support from people who reflexively promote an optimistic use of
ebooks. It's important to remember that the digital-vs-print debate can be
exploited to accomplish goals that have little to do with any kind of reading.

~~~
sitkack
My community college had activist librarians that would purge books that were
critical of the government and capitalism, but they would do it be between
quarters so that students and faculty wouldn't see it.

The discard book section would have whole swaths of subject matter for the
taking. I can only imagine how physical books are getting disappeared now that
libraries have leases to ebook services.

I love ebooks, but they are in addition to, not a replacement of print books.
Most books are no longer in print and are not available as an ebook. The
physical archives are absolutely necessary.

------
fucking_tragedy
Reminder that relying on electronic books means your research and reading
habits can be tracked and stored for later analysis.

Hope you aren't an anomaly, have interests / read material that could be used
against you or are similar to whatever society thinks the boogyman du jour
reads.

With the restrictions the Wassenaar Arrangement can set up, you'd be surprised
how quickly many of your mundane professional interests will put you on the
radar.

~~~
asuffield
Most libraries that I've used have logged every book that I accessed. It's how
they detect (and thereby prevent) damage.

~~~
gohrt
They destroy those records shortly after you return the book, and fight
government attempts to access those records.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
The Library Awareness Program operated in secret during the 80's and sought to
collect those records.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired in May 2015, but there is great
interest in reauthorizing the rights granted to the federal government from
that section. For 14 years, the government had the right to track your library
usage and issue gag orders to librarians involved.

To say they destroy those records would be an oversimplification. Fighting the
government is hard when you're issued a warrant from a secret court and are
facing serious prison time for not obeying it.

------
a3n
Dangerous. We need books like we need seed archives, to reboot after a
civilization's collapse. Electronic-only books would precede a very, very dark
age.

~~~
sitkack
I imagine my kindle dx, loaded with 4GB of technical information being more
important than any one person. Kinda like gasoline in mad max.

------
bholdr
Vernor Vinge envisioned such future in his science fiction (for now) novel
Rainbows End :)

"The UCSD Library conflict actually grows directly out of the other aspect of
the book of interest to e-book fans: the digitization of the contents of the
library. In the timeframe of the book (sometime in the 2020s, apparently),
physical books’ intrinsic value has declined to the point where the books
themselves are considered much less valuable than their contents.

So, to get at the contents, a company is destroying the books
themselves—feeding them through a shredder then blowing the shreds through a
tunnel lined with high-resolution cameras. The cameras capture images of the
shreds, then batteries of computers stitch them together into reconstructions
of the pages, like jigsaw puzzles. The idea is to gather and collate all the
world’s knowledge, to unlock synergies that had been prevented by it all being
so inaccessible before." \-- Review by teleread
[http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/review-rainbows-
end/](http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/review-rainbows-end/)

~~~
dragonwriter
Vinge's description of that project seems to be rather directly inspired by
Google's book scanning project -- in which universities were involved
(including Vinge citing, as the motivation for the fictional project, a
paraphrase of Google's corporate mission statement.)

------
thuuuomas
IANAL, but it's worth noting that libraries have particular usage rights
regarding printed materials that they give up entirely when moving to an ebook
licensing scheme.

[http://www.librarylaw.com/Copyright_and_Libraries.html](http://www.librarylaw.com/Copyright_and_Libraries.html)

------
sfk
The process of creating cross links in one's mind that are actually still
available when not staring at google.com works _far_ better when in sitting in
a library and reading actual books.

I think science (as opposed to hype like "big data") will progress faster
again once the Internet goes out of fashion.

------
w8rbt
Would there be an archive of the original books stored somewhere like the seed
vault in Norway? It seems having one would be a good thing.

~~~
m52go
I believe that's the purpose of the Harvard Depository:

[http://library.harvard.edu/access-
services-2/depository](http://library.harvard.edu/access-
services-2/depository)

~~~
geographomics
Similarly in the UK:
[http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/printedpubs/depositpri...](http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/printedpubs/depositprintedpubs/deposit.html)

------
jefflinwood
I was able to find an interesting report that compares e-book circulation to
printed book circulation, along with a lot of other statistics and research.

[http://the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/LJS...](http://the-
digital-reader.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10/LJSLJ_EbookUsage_PublicLibraries_2015.pdf)

What I find more interesting is the changing role of the library as a physical
institution, in particular as public libraries have crowded out internet cafes
by providing free internet access. Does it still make sense for libraries to
provide a large amount of floor space for books, or can that space be used
better for more internet stations, more community space, more working areas,
or other uses?

~~~
sitkack
I would hope in the future that libraries will provide planetarium like
projection rooms for synthesizing multimedia experiences for doing research by
providing access to information and singular solitude. Something like minority
report along with intelligent agents that can read important summarization,
overlay video, create timelines and interactive mind maps. A semantically
coherent semiotic deep dream.

------
romaniv
A library without physical books is called a server.

~~~
VLM
Its more a merger of museum and library, and you call them artifacts not
books.

Think of plat maps and genealogical records from centuries ago. As a
percentage of library artifacts, they'll increase over time.

Plenty of people will be "into" converting popular books. Then a smaller
subset are into nation wide distributed but unpopular books. Then books not
written in the local language or current language. Finally you end up with
artifacts that are valuable to researchers but might only be read every
century or so. Consider small town city council meeting records. Or church
records of baptisms and funerals (and burials).

Aside from technological or economic collapse (good thing those two have never
historically happened and therefore can never happen in the future...) the
library of 2030 will be a lot like a museum is today, except perhaps more
hands on. So you can walk into the genealogical room and its basically
unchanged from 2015. Teen fiction, well, maybe that will be gone entirely. The
concept of special collections or rare books will be eliminated because the
only remaining books will either be special or rare.

What to do with all the space and salary is interesting. My suspicion is the
days of 90%+ of American kids living less than 15 minutes walking distance
from a public library are about to come to an end. I live in the county seat
and have the largest public library, and probably every library in the county
will eventually close and send all their genealogical artifacts to our
formerly city now county library. We already have a small county historical
society museum and I would not be surprised to see them merge with "the"
county library.

Probably not a good decade to try to get a library science degree and become a
librarian.

Interestingly there is a subculture that refuses to read off screens, even
here, on an online on-screen discussion site, and that combined with very
rapid printers and print on demand and ordering online means that bizarrely
enough there might be more paper books in 2030 than in 2015, its just that
cities won't pile so many up in one building. Much like the decline of public
wells as a source of urban drinking water doesn't mean we've evolved past
water drinking, it just means we have more faucets than mouths now, including
faucets in our homes, so a neighborhood sharing a well seems weird and is
basically culturally dead. Likewise in 2030 the idea of sharing a pile of
books might feel icky, like a neighborhood sharing underwear or shoes does
today.

------
rquantz
I can imagine this happening for most libraries, but considering that paper is
a longer lasting medium than digital, I certainly hope there are a significant
number of actual book libraries still peppering the landscape a generation
from now.

~~~
WalterBright
Having lost a lot of books in a flood, I'm happier with digital copies I can
make backups of.

------
mediasavvy
Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker, is a remarkable discussion of what's lost
when libraries destroy bound newspapers when they are "replaced" by microfilm.

[https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gate...](https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gatest.html)

------
restalis
Hmm... What I first read in the title was "when the (computing) library-
writers will cease writing offline (but still digital) versions of docs for
their work?", which appears as a controverted claim to me. With "let's stop
the anachronistic practice of using physical paper for information
consumption", I agree.

------
WalterBright
Archivists and collectors have always been deciding what was worth keeping and
what to toss. The digital revolution is not new in this regard.

------
Aardwolf
Hopefully never? If there are archeologists in a few thousands years, books
will be a lot more useful than remains of harddrives

~~~
gohrt
what are they going to do with millions of books, if they are incapable of
decoding hard drives

~~~
Aardwolf
study them, learn our script, do what historians do ...

------
jtth
Never, hopefully.

------
NvidiaCUDA
I've scanned most of my books at home on a DIY book Scanner and/or a Fujitsu
contactless scanner and then threw them away. (Many acquaintances of mine who
don't value intellectual property were shocked that I threw books away, but I
couldn't morally justify donating them or selling them if I retained a copy.)

I freed up a lot of space in the house, and now I can read anything anywhere.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
Libraries purge books literally all the time, and have been for years. Forex:
[http://awfullibrarybooks.net](http://awfullibrarybooks.net)

~~~
wyclif
They do, but the OP isn't talking about purging awful Whitney Houston books or
old WordPerfect manuals from the '80s. He's talking about the tipping point
when libraries decide it isn't worth keeping print copies of valuable works
around because they've been digitized. We haven't reached that tipping point
yet.

~~~
ghaff
No, but this sort of question was very much a part of the controversial New
York Public Library renovation plans. [1] It was/is a complex project with a
lot of moving parts but certainly part of it revolved around the number of
books to store, how accessible they would be, and how optimized their storage
conditions.

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-new-york-
publ...](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-new-york-public-
library-comes-around)

