
Librarians in Florida went rogue to save 2,300 books from an algorithm - webmaven
https://qz.com/877961/librarians-in-florida-went-rogue-to-save-2361-books-from-an-algorithm/
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canadian_voter
> He says his aim was actually to save the library money in the long run, by
> not having to repurchase books which often go in and out of fashion with
> readers. One of Finley’s choices, for instance, was John Steinbeck’s
> “Cannery Row.”

Any librarian worth their salt will tell you that every library should have a
copy of Cannery Row. Any algorithm that says it should be discarded is simply
wrong.

Circulation numbers can be very useful. But they cannot tell you what people
will be looking for in the future. Common sense and experience are necessary
to put the list in the proper context.

A good librarian can talk knowledgeably about thousands of books. They are
community treasures that are not easily replaced by algorithms. They do a lot
more than just put books on the shelf. Just as there will always be
bartenders, there will always be librarians.

There is a culture war going on in libraries. The old guard -- book reading,
book loving librarians -- are being replaced, especially at the top, by hip
"Library Scientists" who want to push ebooks, internet access terminals and
even rock concerts in libraries.

Ultimately there is a balance to be struck. Budgets are tight and libraries
are evolving. But if libraries are going to remain useful and relevant, they
will need to provide both internet access AND copies of "Cannery Row".

That said, the guy in the article did a bad thing and he'll likely lose his
job at minimum.

~~~
slededit
This effectively boils down to whether libraries should serve what people
actually read/do - or what they "should" read. Pretty much all the comments
from this article fall on one of the two sides with each person talking past
each other.

~~~
khedoros1
I don't think that the issue isn't the difference between what people "should"
and do read, but between what people read now and what they're likely to read
in the future (on the scale of years or decades). Collective tastes of the
public ebb and flow over time.

The trick would be between finding the difference between _actually_ needing
the book later, or just hoarding something that will never be needed
again...or at least, that introduces more of a cost to keep than it would cost
to dispose of it and buy it again later if it _does_ come back into fashion.

~~~
slededit
Optimizing for future use would generally lead you to purging most older books
altogether, as newly released books generally have higher readership. With few
exceptions its unlikely for popular taste to switch to a classic book en masse
at the same time.

The only exception is if you knew a school were to assign the book as required
reading to an entire grade - but that's really a rare and special case.

FWIW I think there is room for curated "should read" sections in a library.
Optimizing purely for use is more the purview of a bookstore. But to support
that the bulk of the shelf space should be serving the broadest use possible.

~~~
khedoros1
I had in mind cases where a book might surge from being checked out once a
year to being checked out once a month, maybe something like a historical book
about a specific Native American tribe when they're in the news for a while,
or something.

It seems like one of those "big data things", looking for odd relationships
between things, like vampires being more popular during Democratic
presidencies and zombies being more popular during Republican ones (as a
tongue-in-cheek example: [http://www.mrscienceshow.com/2009/05/correlation-of-
week-zom...](http://www.mrscienceshow.com/2009/05/correlation-of-week-zombies-
vampires.html))

The librarian in the article cited a future need to re-buy a book that was
previously culled. I guess what I'm trying to work toward would be an idea of
finding non-obvious signs of when certain _categories_ of books might become
more and less popular, what patterns (if any) govern that schedule, and from
that, make predictions of expected cost in keeping certain books around, as
opposed to selling them off immediately. I'm playing around with the idea of
whether there's a better way than "current readership + age of book" to
predict, to a useful degree, the probability of it being more or less popular
in the future.

------
stinkytaco
So, I'm a librarian. Our library uses what's called the CREW method [1]. It
does a good job explaining the reasons for weeding and the parameters.

It's important to mention that a well maintained collection gets used more
than one that is not reviewed. The "younger" the average age of your
collection, the more it gets used. This isn't just because people don't like
old books, but they don't like books that are yellowing, grey, worn,
irrelevant, etc, etc. I recognize that libraries have many roles to play, but
it is not the place of every library to play every role. A community public
library should check out books, not store them. (There's obviously exceptions
here. For example, my library maintains a local history collection).

Ultimately, for a public library there is much more going on than books.
Wireless Internet, meeting rooms and simply its characteristic as a physical
place (chairs, tables, etc.) are all part of why people support a library and
having a new, clean and well maintained collection is part of increasing the
library's appeal across all those areas.

1:
[https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ld/pubs/crew/index.html](https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ld/pubs/crew/index.html)

~~~
jdmichal
> A community public library should check out books, not store them. There's
> obviously exceptions here. For example, my library maintains a local history
> collection.

I could certainly see the value of each community library having some space
allocated to different "specialty" sections. That would make for a pretty rich
loan inventory.

~~~
stinkytaco
Absolutely. I've been to libraries with good specialized collections. Most of
these focus on local interests or history.

I've also been to many libraries that just _feel_ like dumps and are not using
space well. They have masses of cookbooks or old magazines that they call a
special collection. There's a fetish surrounding "the book".

In the end this guy is arbitrarily deciding which books have value and which
don't, which should ring an alarm bell for us. We might agree with what he
saved, but we also don't know what he _didn 't_ feel was worth saving. That's
why as systemic approach is so important.

------
paulddraper
> His creation, the fictional Charles Finley,

FYI, that's the alias of choice for Sam Axe, a freelance vigilante in the TV
series "Burn Notice"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Axe#Sam_Axe_as_Chuck_Finle...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Axe#Sam_Axe_as_Chuck_Finley))

~~~
the_watcher
Chuck Finley also pitched in the MLB for 16 years[1]. The weirdest part of the
whole story to me was that he gave his fake ballplayer the name of an actual
ballplayer.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Finley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Finley)

------
tokai
I do not understand why he loaned them with a fake name. He could just have
made the loans in his own name. If they questioned his high loan numbers, he
could have told them that he was compiling a bibliography, or researching
typography, or something, in his own free time.

He went through a lot of trouble to make what he did illegal.

~~~
lotu
I doubt he knew this was illegal. Charging someone with faking a library card
is about the same level as shutting down a lemonade stand for failure to have
a business license.

------
sbuttgereit
And yet no discussion of what books were not carried that otherwise could have
been without this distortion in data. It's fine to talk about the merits of
what was saved, but it is a false discussion if there isn't some inclusion of
what opportunities may have been lost as well.

------
mixmastamyk
Sounds like if shelf-space is at a premium, free ebooks for everything over
say, 50 years old should be the norm. (Broken copyright law is the likely
impediment).

Sure, keep a few physical copies for popular classics but ebooks are clearly
the solution for the long tail, and so much easier to carry.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't agree. You can't browse an ebook the same way you can a physical book,
and while I very much appreciate Amazon's 'you might also like...'
suggestions, I only rate thema round a C+/B- grade. The great value of
libraries and bookstores is discoverability as opposed to perfect organization
(although that's also very valuable). I can think of quite a few books that I
might not have encountered if some librarian or buyer hadn't bucked the
prevailing taste; conversely on the rare occasions when I go into a big
bookstore now I feel really alienated by the shallowness of the selection and
the general lack of awareness among the bookstore staff about, well, anything.

I never encountered this attitude of 'books as product' until I came to the
US. I remember going into a Borders and looking for some Dashiell Hammett
books - I had been in San Francisco a few months, and Dashiell Hammett was a
_very_ famous mystery writer who came from and wrote about SF in the 1930s, so
I wanted to learn more about the literary culture of the city I had moved to.
the people in the store had never heard of him, didn't understand why interest
in local authors would be a thing, and couldn't recommend any other bookstores
because they were not really Book People, they just happened to work in a
store that sold books but whose corporate culture required staff to refer to
them as 'product'. This would be like going to a store that specialized in
Computer Science books and having to deal with people who had never heard the
names Turing, Von Neumann, or Knuth. Capitalism can be very corrosive of
culture that way, Absent a reliable metric for quality, it can only rate
popularity and novelty and so discounts long-term relations at the expense of
short-term returns.

Amazon recommendations are often semantically on point but it will often
recommend books that are merely derivative. 'Frequently bought together' is a
great reminder to get some batteries or accessories for some electronic gizmo
you bought, but that doesn't work so well for books, where reading one might
alter your subsequent buying preferences onto a new path because you read the
book and it changed your perspective in some fashion.

Admittedly a lot of my reading tends towards the obscure, so I can't blame
Amazon for doing what they do if it works for the vast majority of their
consumers. It's great when I want something very specific and I'm a happy
regular customer, but I could happily spend _hours_ in a second hand
bookstore.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Sorry, we're talking about libraries (right?), many of which carry ebooks, and
have non-infinite shelf space. I was also trying to make the point that
anything over X years should be public domain.

Sure physical books have their benefits (as do ebooks), however I'd much
rather have an ebook than nothing, because the book was thrown in the garbage
due to lack of space.

------
jackskell
And, not one comment here or in the story about associating book title viewing
activity with a library account with personally identifiable information.

They could have used book activity records, I think.

I guess stripping personal information was too much work.

------
brudgers
Books book culling reminds me of:

 _1984_

 _Canticle for Leibowitz_

 _Fahrenheit 451_

 _The Name of the Rose_

~~~
neaden
At the same time new books keep coming out, either a library stops buying new
books, continually expands so it always has more room, or disposes of some old
books. I think an algorithm is a good guide, but I would trust the Librarians
to be able to veto it's recommendations and keep some books that are not read
often.

~~~
a3n
Yeah, the algorithm probably needs adjustment and flexibility.

As long as a book is available within reasonable time via inter-library loan,
the library system hasn't lost the book. The algorithm (or more generally,
"the practice") probably needs a "consolidate" outcome in addition to "drop."

~~~
dragonwriter
> As long as a book is available within reasonable time via inter-library
> loan, the library system hasn't lost the book.

That's not entirely true, as there is a significant difference between having
a book browsable on the shelf and havingnit borrowable with substantial
latency via ILL, so there is a loss even if there is still some access
available.

------
neaden
While I can certainly sympathies with the Librarian in this story and agree
that human judgement should trump an algorithm in what books a library stocks
the method used here seems inappropriate and counterproductive in the long
term.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
> and agree that human judgement should trump an algorithm in what books a
> library stocks

Why? People are much more biased than machines. If this algorithm is well
written and unbiased then we may have a case of someone saving books that
speak to their biases. What if it was revealed it was books about young earth,
anti-vaccination, promotion of Islamic extremism, and white supremacy? Would
you be so welcoming of these rebel librarians?

The nice part of the algorithm is that, in theory, it should just be looking
at circulation numbers and culling appropriately. Regardless, this is all a
stop-gap measure until we can get every library digital so we don't have to
worry about shelf space.

~~~
cestith
An algorithm that only takes into account popularity and not reviews nor
importance of the work to literature or to its technical field contains its
own biases.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Says who? It could cross-reference a list of important cultural works and make
them exempt, for example. That list can be compiled by a committee instead of
a lone guy who may have an agenda.

~~~
anigbrowl
But the whole point of librarians is to allow that to happen, rather than
thinking there's one perfect list of books that everyone should just copy
from. _For sure_ you would see lots of bias - which you could then measure and
challenge, but which could also turn out to be valuable.

It's odd to me that you can't see the inherent bias in saying that popularity
is a proxy for literary value and designing your algorithm around that. Sure,
it'll give you an unbiased insight into what's popular, but that assumes that
libraries are in the business of catering to the popular taste, when we have a
bustling private sector to do that for us already, which takes account of the
fact that a great deal of the publishing industry's output is disposable and
of only short-term interest. I mean, McDonalds is arguably the world's most
popular restaurant chain, but that doesn't mean their food has significant
gastronomic value, does it?

What is in the public interest, and what the public is currently interested
in, are two _wholly_ different things.

