I was reading a recent article about the efforts by people not to ban books. While I think the sentiment is good-natured, as a helper at my local library, this is actually very problematic. People donate to us all the time, as is how libraries work. Sometimes the books are unpopular, unproductive, harmful, or just low tier.
I would never apply this logic to human beings, all humans have value if the system knows how to channel them correctly, but books are inanimate objects where their expected purpose is to be read (if you were to say a book is useful on the basis it could be used for something like ripping the pages out for wiping a floor for example, that would make its usefulness as a book cease). Often we are over capacity from the donations, so once a year we have a book sale at the church (libraries and churches getting along? Crazy, right?), but even then, a lot just isn’t sold, and we’re forced to either give them to another holding place or, in the worst case scenario, cremate or trash them. I am all for free speech, but freedom to produce speech is different from freedom to preserve speech, and I’m sure even the ancient Romans produced a lot of scribbly nonsense.
Suppose you were in my shoes and the library could preserve anything forever but not everything forever. What criteria would you use in order to decide what media (books, movies, games, etc.) gets to stay and what has to go?
I don’t have a direct answer to your question, but it reminded me of a Tom Scott video where a library tries to keep a copy of everything you can think of (even stuff like leaflets) because it’s not possible to know now what will be relevant/interesting in the future, so it’s better to err on the side of keeping more stuff than necessary than to lose things that might be useful in the future. I suck at summarizing, so here’s the link to this video:
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Somebody has to make the call. There was this dinosaur book for kids in a little free library. It didn’t even have an author or publisher, because it was AI garbage. Full of misspellings, etc. I contemplated throwing it in the trash because I don’t think it should exist. But for some reason I had trouble deciding that for others.
Digitize and delete? Scan straight to OCR and dump the books. One hard drive can store a lot of books.
Train LLMs on large bulks of data that meet criteria for deletion, thereby shrinking like 100 petabytes to a terabyte, albeit imperfectly. That way, you have a collection of AI bots that you can chat with about all the deleted data. And I suppose the threshold for deletion is, “How disastrous could a hallucination about this be?”
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Drop accounting and commercial transaction documents. Invoices, receipts, shipping declarations, etc… Sure it could be interesting to future archeologists but it makes the huge majority of all documents generated by humanity. We still have millions of untranslated accounting docs from ancient Mesopotàmia. It not really that useful.
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Content published in less than 1000 copies, or read/watched less than 1000 times if online. Fanfiction, self published books and so on. Again it’s a loss for a couple of niche future historians. You drop a significant % of storage, but even minor works representing our society remain.
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I’d use a better compression method and kick the can down the road to the next sucker to take the job.
Look for the political association of the author. Right wing? Into the trash it goes.
Harry potter did make books popular for a bit…
Keep the most popular at the time. Pulp. The weird fan fic you wrote when you were 14, memes. The things that actual people enjoy, there is a lot that someone 1000 years from now can learn reading your weird embarrasing fan fiction and diary.
The rich and powerful are going to preserve all their crap just fine, the normal everyday doesn’t seem to get high priority for preservation.
The rich and powerful are going to preserve all their crap just fine, the normal everyday doesn’t seem to get high priority for preservation.
I don’t know if that is true when we are talking about hundreds if not thousands of years. Money and power can only go so far after you die.
I think mostly it comes down to if you were important to history or not. Even then it comes down to who it telling the history.
Weed out via the tolerance metric.
If a piece of writing is non fiction, and exists to foment hatred, bye-bye. mein kampf is not literature.
It is history though. Erasing it from history would make it harder to study how insane that man was, which is immediately apparent in basically any part of that book. In Germany, Mein Kampf is banned except for educational purposes, eg in history class. Nothing conveys just how bad Hitler was as effectively as his own writing.
In Germany, Mein Kampf is banned except for educational purposes, eg in history class.
Strictly speaking this is incorrect, although the situation is somewhat complicated. There are laws that can be and were used to limit its redistribution (mainly the rule against anti-constitutional propaganda), but there are dissenting judgements saying original prints from before the end of WW2 cannot fall under this, since they are pre-constitutional. One particular reprint from 2018 has been classified as “liable to corrupt the young”, but to my knowledge this only means it cannot be publicly advertised.
What is interesting though is how distribution and reprinting was prevented historically, which is copyright. As Hitlers legal heir the state of Bavaria held the copyright until it expired in 2015 and simply didn’t grant license to anything except versions with scholarly commentary. But technically since then anybody can print and distribute new copies of the book. If this violates any law will then be determined on a case-by-case basis after the fact.
Something had to go, that’s the premise.
Compared to anything else in existence, the shit that man wrote is the least useful thing.
Coin flip.
Less time spent deciding what’s important, and more time spent improving the service to the point where overpopulation isn’t a problem.
By the way, random selection is one of the few methods to guarantee a fair and representatative sample.
In case of a library I’d want at least part of the catalog represent media of the times is was created, because science also uses that.
One reason archaelogy in Pompei is valuable is that everyrhing - including pornograhic graffiti and slander was preserved, giving us a different perspective into those times than books by medieval historians.
Of course, I’d also want - in another part of the catalog - books/media by manually selected scientists, artists, historians.
When i think about the “purpose” of a library, I think of it as a place where people can go to learn and be entertained free of charge. If a particular book doesn’t teach anything valuable, nor is it entertaining, I can’t think of any reason why a library should waste its space on it. Thats not to say knowledge shouldnt be saved for future generations, but thats what an archive is for.
I would sort according to it’s relevance/value to it’s genre as well as the redundancy of the information contained.
This is not a good method, but…
I think I’d specify an a number… let’s say, 2/3 of the books get to survive, the others will be thrown away. Then I’ll start seperating them into three groups; the ones I become immediately sure are great books, the ones I’m sure are trash, and ones I’m unsure about. Then I’ll go random: if I chose too many books as good ones, I’ll randomly take some of them out, unless I’m sure they are all great books that should stay in the library. Or start randomly adding books from the unsure pile to the ones that get to stay.
Well. Not a great method.
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