The Public and Weeding.
It isn't a secret that the public as a whole is very much against the idea of book burning and book destruction. In fact this is a great sign of a society which values thinking and reading, the problem is that sometimes you kind of need to destroy a book or two in the course of running a library. Whether it is because we need space for more books or we need space to make room for computers which get used more than the books or because the books are creeping around ten years since they were last borrowed and the urge to mercy-kill it rising within us we all of us need to weed.
Book burning can also be called biblioclasm or libricide. The things you learn.
Image Source: Wikimedia.
The reason I was thinking about this topic, other than my desperate need every weekday to find a topic to write about(and I'm seriously running out of stuff to talk about after four years and almost fifty topics of varying importance (seriously, I did an entry on Sleeping in the library one day.) it is getting harder to think of something, the fact that I'm not working in a library and thus exposed to more stuff makes it doubly hard, I really need to get a job), was because I was on 4chan in the Politically Incorrect(otherwise known as /pol/, which is the sewers sewer) section and people were talking about libraries and their destruction policies, considering that 4chan is the sewer of the internet and most of the people on /pol/ are mostly Nazi's I thought they'd be in favour of book destruction on some level. But instead I found a lot of people who were in appalled that libraries destroy books when they have to.
The thing about 4chan is that despite it being a generally terrible place for normal people(seriously, avoid it if you are in any way or form squeamish) it is anonymous and as a result you get to hear peoples genuine opinions about things, stuff they'd never admit to in a million years they'll quite happily say when no-one knows who they are. Sometimes it is crude, sometimes it is funny and sometimes it is just lies meant to troll people(usually pretty easy to spot), but there is almost always some grain of truth in what people are saying they believe in. Whether it be white supremacists or space elevator enthusiast(or a worrying combination of both) anonymity gives rise eventually to people telling their own truths, also the fact that the moderators there rarely censor things makes people more willing to say what is on their minds.
There was an article on Cracked about book weeding once, written by an Australian Librarian but looking for Weed, Cracked and Library online just got me a lot of places to buy "legal" drugs and probably put my name on a watchlist somewhere.
Image Source: The Illustrated Bible History (Wilson Company: New York, 1845) - Via Ptara.com
I tried to explain to these people that libraries are different to archives and that books aren't as singular as they used to be back in the days of the middle ages, most books in a library exist in thousands of homes around the world and other libraries as well as online. They accused me of working for the illuminati and being a part of the problem. They didn't like the idea of anything getting destroyed which might one day prove valuable for the human race, working off the assumption that books will be needed if "The Happening"(the event which seemingly all of 4chan wishes to happen is known as "The Happening", it means the collapse of civilisation and the rising up of whatever faction they believe themselves to be a part of and the extermination of whatever faction or group they don't like) happens so that when electricity is dead they'll still have some kind of guide on how to farm, hunt and look after themselves while the world burns around them.
I like the idea that even Internet Nazi's want to preserve libraries, even if it is only so that they can more effectively rebuild society after the collapse but I don't like the fact that they wouldn't accept how limited the space in a library actually is. They said to just put up more shelves, not realising that that doesn't work for very long. They said that we should try to sell the books and it was pointed out that usually the books were so bad that no-one anywhere would want them and that we usually couldn't give them away even if we wanted to(hell a great idea for kids libraries is to offer free old books as prizes for stupid everyday things like cleanest desk or whatever but I'm pretty sure kids would rather have a new book than an old one). I pointed out that I've never binned a book from my own personal library(which is now spread over two houses and almost certainly growing) and that nearly every book a library destroys is still available somewhere else but that in terms of need a library doesn't need every book it has, it has to make very very difficult decisions about what they want and what they need to best service their community and if some books needed to be destroyed then that was the only way to go. I was then referred to a Rabbi Bookburner for a while.
I pointed out that Archives exist to preserve information which doesn't have a back-up anywhere and that libraries exist, now, to provide access to information as best as they can but they can't manage this for every topic for every person. They have to be able to dump books or they wouldn't ever be able to get new ones in. Eventually I realised I wasn't going to win. There was another guy on there who was a library person, he claimed he worked in a university library and said it was a nightmare whenever some old guy died because his kids would inevitably dump the books on the library thinking they were doing a great and noble thing, helping future generations get access to knowledge of their elders, but more often than not they dumped them after first getting all the professors they could find who were related to the topic to have a dig through to confirm that nothing was valuable or vital to the subject which they didn't already have covered. The guy seemed upset about it but said he'd been doing it for years and just was tired of the fetishism that people have about books, it made sense when books were literally printed out by hand and took years to make and held knowledge only preserved in that one place but today books are printed in quantities of thousands and distributed globally. You'd need to do something terribly evil to remove a book from the world today, they're distributed and safe, especially safe from a librarian having to take their tatter old copy and replace it with a more up to date version. Universities have a harder time weeding because students tend to get angrier about everything so much faster than normal people would.
The public at large are very much against the destruction of books it appears. No matter what arguments you put forwards they'll oppose it on almost spiritual grounds. I'm very much torn on this because I am against the destruction of books and knowledge but I know that libraries aren't infinite spaces and we do need to destroy and eliminate some of our old books every now and then. What this makes me think is that librarians might be better served not trying to make the process so public and just going ahead with it behind the scenes, this obviously would eventually backfire causing a backlash from the public when they found out("Secret book burning? I'm even more irrationally angry than I would have been otherwise!") but the backlash right now from publicly telling people what we're doing is already a distraction.
However we don't always get it right, for example one library in Illinois just removed every book published before 2003 from its non-fiction section, mostly it appears to save time and money on its RFID implementation. I'm sure that there are other examples, its why we consult the public and why we try to make sure that more than one person is involved in the process(when I destroyed the weeded books from the JF section while doing work experience they told me that anything which looked like it was accidentally put in I could put aside for consideration to be saved or for sale for charity, I was the fourth person by this point who'd gone over the books) and that we try to make sure that we don't just weed to make space but we weed because what we're replacing it with will be more necessary to the public.
Helpful links:
Some other librarians talking about Weeding from a few years ago.
Why people hate weeding books.
University Weeding woes.
This Weeks Topics.
Monday.
The Public and Weeding.
Tuesday.
Space management in libraries, what do we need?
Wednesday.
The library in Pop-culture.
Thursday.
Book Review: Wool. And the future of publishing online.
Friday.
Why I like Writing stuff.
Saturday.
The Quiet Young Girls Guide to Multiple Personalities.
Sunday.
Short Story Sunday.
My Day.
My cold is nearly done with, but I'm having trouble sleeping because every couple of hours I'd wake up coughing like there is no tomorrow and then take about an hour to get back to sleep. It is terrifying because I kept waking up all night and thinking I was about to die.
I ended up sleeping 12 hours in total with occasional breaks when I'd wake up, I finally worked out how to sleep sitting upright in my bed which seemed to have stopped the problem but eventually I slipped back down again.
Tomorrow I'm going back to school and doing my work for half the day before I go to my writing club to show them the short story I wrote yesterday. I'm not exactly proud of it, but I think that it is okay, I'm also going to include a link to the Spanish entires I made the week before last, so if they wanted to see what I'd done in terms of writing in the last month they can.
YouTube Clip of the day.
A little bit crude but still a funny thing that someone much more observant than I am found.
Book burning can also be called biblioclasm or libricide. The things you learn.
Image Source: Wikimedia.
The reason I was thinking about this topic, other than my desperate need every weekday to find a topic to write about(and I'm seriously running out of stuff to talk about after four years and almost fifty topics of varying importance (seriously, I did an entry on Sleeping in the library one day.) it is getting harder to think of something, the fact that I'm not working in a library and thus exposed to more stuff makes it doubly hard, I really need to get a job), was because I was on 4chan in the Politically Incorrect(otherwise known as /pol/, which is the sewers sewer) section and people were talking about libraries and their destruction policies, considering that 4chan is the sewer of the internet and most of the people on /pol/ are mostly Nazi's I thought they'd be in favour of book destruction on some level. But instead I found a lot of people who were in appalled that libraries destroy books when they have to.
The thing about 4chan is that despite it being a generally terrible place for normal people(seriously, avoid it if you are in any way or form squeamish) it is anonymous and as a result you get to hear peoples genuine opinions about things, stuff they'd never admit to in a million years they'll quite happily say when no-one knows who they are. Sometimes it is crude, sometimes it is funny and sometimes it is just lies meant to troll people(usually pretty easy to spot), but there is almost always some grain of truth in what people are saying they believe in. Whether it be white supremacists or space elevator enthusiast(or a worrying combination of both) anonymity gives rise eventually to people telling their own truths, also the fact that the moderators there rarely censor things makes people more willing to say what is on their minds.
There was an article on Cracked about book weeding once, written by an Australian Librarian but looking for Weed, Cracked and Library online just got me a lot of places to buy "legal" drugs and probably put my name on a watchlist somewhere.
Image Source: The Illustrated Bible History (Wilson Company: New York, 1845) - Via Ptara.com
I tried to explain to these people that libraries are different to archives and that books aren't as singular as they used to be back in the days of the middle ages, most books in a library exist in thousands of homes around the world and other libraries as well as online. They accused me of working for the illuminati and being a part of the problem. They didn't like the idea of anything getting destroyed which might one day prove valuable for the human race, working off the assumption that books will be needed if "The Happening"(the event which seemingly all of 4chan wishes to happen is known as "The Happening", it means the collapse of civilisation and the rising up of whatever faction they believe themselves to be a part of and the extermination of whatever faction or group they don't like) happens so that when electricity is dead they'll still have some kind of guide on how to farm, hunt and look after themselves while the world burns around them.
I like the idea that even Internet Nazi's want to preserve libraries, even if it is only so that they can more effectively rebuild society after the collapse but I don't like the fact that they wouldn't accept how limited the space in a library actually is. They said to just put up more shelves, not realising that that doesn't work for very long. They said that we should try to sell the books and it was pointed out that usually the books were so bad that no-one anywhere would want them and that we usually couldn't give them away even if we wanted to(hell a great idea for kids libraries is to offer free old books as prizes for stupid everyday things like cleanest desk or whatever but I'm pretty sure kids would rather have a new book than an old one). I pointed out that I've never binned a book from my own personal library(which is now spread over two houses and almost certainly growing) and that nearly every book a library destroys is still available somewhere else but that in terms of need a library doesn't need every book it has, it has to make very very difficult decisions about what they want and what they need to best service their community and if some books needed to be destroyed then that was the only way to go. I was then referred to a Rabbi Bookburner for a while.
I pointed out that Archives exist to preserve information which doesn't have a back-up anywhere and that libraries exist, now, to provide access to information as best as they can but they can't manage this for every topic for every person. They have to be able to dump books or they wouldn't ever be able to get new ones in. Eventually I realised I wasn't going to win. There was another guy on there who was a library person, he claimed he worked in a university library and said it was a nightmare whenever some old guy died because his kids would inevitably dump the books on the library thinking they were doing a great and noble thing, helping future generations get access to knowledge of their elders, but more often than not they dumped them after first getting all the professors they could find who were related to the topic to have a dig through to confirm that nothing was valuable or vital to the subject which they didn't already have covered. The guy seemed upset about it but said he'd been doing it for years and just was tired of the fetishism that people have about books, it made sense when books were literally printed out by hand and took years to make and held knowledge only preserved in that one place but today books are printed in quantities of thousands and distributed globally. You'd need to do something terribly evil to remove a book from the world today, they're distributed and safe, especially safe from a librarian having to take their tatter old copy and replace it with a more up to date version. Universities have a harder time weeding because students tend to get angrier about everything so much faster than normal people would.
The public at large are very much against the destruction of books it appears. No matter what arguments you put forwards they'll oppose it on almost spiritual grounds. I'm very much torn on this because I am against the destruction of books and knowledge but I know that libraries aren't infinite spaces and we do need to destroy and eliminate some of our old books every now and then. What this makes me think is that librarians might be better served not trying to make the process so public and just going ahead with it behind the scenes, this obviously would eventually backfire causing a backlash from the public when they found out("Secret book burning? I'm even more irrationally angry than I would have been otherwise!") but the backlash right now from publicly telling people what we're doing is already a distraction.
However we don't always get it right, for example one library in Illinois just removed every book published before 2003 from its non-fiction section, mostly it appears to save time and money on its RFID implementation. I'm sure that there are other examples, its why we consult the public and why we try to make sure that more than one person is involved in the process(when I destroyed the weeded books from the JF section while doing work experience they told me that anything which looked like it was accidentally put in I could put aside for consideration to be saved or for sale for charity, I was the fourth person by this point who'd gone over the books) and that we try to make sure that we don't just weed to make space but we weed because what we're replacing it with will be more necessary to the public.
Helpful links:
Some other librarians talking about Weeding from a few years ago.
Why people hate weeding books.
University Weeding woes.
This Weeks Topics.
Monday.
The Public and Weeding.
Tuesday.
Space management in libraries, what do we need?
Wednesday.
The library in Pop-culture.
Thursday.
Book Review: Wool. And the future of publishing online.
Friday.
Why I like Writing stuff.
Saturday.
The Quiet Young Girls Guide to Multiple Personalities.
Sunday.
Short Story Sunday.
My Day.
My cold is nearly done with, but I'm having trouble sleeping because every couple of hours I'd wake up coughing like there is no tomorrow and then take about an hour to get back to sleep. It is terrifying because I kept waking up all night and thinking I was about to die.
I ended up sleeping 12 hours in total with occasional breaks when I'd wake up, I finally worked out how to sleep sitting upright in my bed which seemed to have stopped the problem but eventually I slipped back down again.
Tomorrow I'm going back to school and doing my work for half the day before I go to my writing club to show them the short story I wrote yesterday. I'm not exactly proud of it, but I think that it is okay, I'm also going to include a link to the Spanish entires I made the week before last, so if they wanted to see what I'd done in terms of writing in the last month they can.
YouTube Clip of the day.
A little bit crude but still a funny thing that someone much more observant than I am found.
Click to view