I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the neutrino and particle physics.
Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.
(Taylor, Lunar Science: A post-Apollo view)
> a state university’s property, even if it’s been deemed trash, cannot be transferred to private individuals.
What a waste! Sure, allowing something like this could (and probably would) be abused, but I think the waste is worse.
I'm glad your middle school was able to do what they did!
A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark:
>What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'
If there is enough space to have a room full of books, it would be better used as a publicly accessible set of stacks. The only real reason to have a librarian-only room is for books that are rare and valuable.
Someone needs to take up Carnegie's mantle and finish the job which he began.
What's the limiting principle you propose? It has to be something real libraries and library funding sources can take action on, because they have to take real-world actions on them. So this is not a time for aspirational speeches or vague exhortations to "do more", which is the exact opposite of a limiting principle anyhow. What is "enough"?
As I noted, it's a pain for me to have to drive down to DC to get access to a book which _used_ to be in the local library system, but isn't anymore, or to purchase my own copy (which wasn't previously necessary).
My current library is around 2000 square feet and I acquire around 1000 books a year, so I have to toss around 1000 books a year, because they're made of matter and take up space.
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ref_=search_f...
In the first edition, he was depicted as a large creature, and Tolkien was upset about it, and in the second edition, changed the description to small.
This information was gathered by a rare book seller who's videos I find immensely interesting.
I rarely go to a library to loan a specific work - I go there to find a work. This means going through dozens of potentially-relevant titles, taking them off the shelf, quickly browsing through them, and taking the one or two best ones home. This entire workflow becomes impossible if the book isn't readily available.
A book hidden in a box in the basement, or which arrives after only a few days, might as well not exist at all. I'm simply not going to scroll through a list, order several dozen books solely by their title alone, and come back a few days later (if this is even allowed at all): it's just not worth my time.
The whole "we keep a copy in a central archive" approach only works for historical purposes, not for actually making it available for reading. If you do that you have to also make digital scans trivially available for browsing - and in practice that rarely happens!
If you are a software dev, go volunteer at a library and offer up your time to do this. Do something for your community, do something for yourself.
You misunderstand the environment, "offering" doesn't work if the library haven't asked for help, in that case you're just ignored. You see, whatever you do for them would require participation and at least some effort on their side.
Some other organization could help here, but going to the library and begging them to let you help them is a non starter.
This is hardly comparable to difficult philosophy books as mentioned in the article, though. To my mind, the poin of libraries is to house and make accessible difficult or challenging books that might not necessarily be popular. I was shocked when I first visited an American library and found large numbers of mass-market paperbacks and magazines. When I say 'large numbers' I mean 10 or 20 copies of books by Oprah or other celebrity authors. Librarians would have it that they're serving the community by making these books available in the library around the same time they're available in bookstores, ignoring the fact that once the publisher's marketing drive is over all those extra copies are going to be surplus. I do not understand why you would buy 20 copies of one book when you could have it and 19 other books.
My local Half-Price Books (a second-hand bookstore chain) has a vastly better selection than my local library.
How dare librarians... give the people the books they want to read???
University libraries of course might be a good exception to this rule. But your local public library should be a way to make reading accessible to the average middle to lower class family. And that means providing the materials they want to read - not what you think they should.
It's always going to be a balance for librarians. They don't get to operate in ivory towers disconnected from those local taxpayers whom fund them.
They do serve a lot of people with this method, but am a different cohort. If a library is to serve a diverse group of people it should also remember book snobs like me. When I visit my local library it is as if anything remotely classic is hidden in a secret area, you can’t find hardly any of them.
Given the number of books I've been unable to find when I wanted them save in the Library of Congress (which won't loan, necessitating a trip to DC, or finding and purchasing my own copy), and the number of times my ILL requests have been turned down, a last copy per system mechanism seems the best for preserving access.
Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and NYPL coordinate on exactly this https://recap.princeton.edu/
I've done ILL in three major cities. The shortest time it took to get the books requested was 14 days. Some have taken over 60.
Resources:
https://archive.org/want/?mode=donation_book
https://help.archive.org/help/does-the-internet-archive-have...
https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a...
https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
When I got it, I read through it, solid for three days. Wow. Stunning look at a technology in its infancy.
The name of the Bookseller was Luma Kunda. Thank you Mr Kunda. I later learned from someone at the nearby bus stop, that Mr Kunda possessed an eidetic memory.
I would have loved to hear him tell stories about what he saw in the tarot cards.
These libraries do not coordinate the deaccessioning. If it ever gets down to 2 copies, there's a non-zero chance that they will deaccession their copies simultaneously, and then there are none.
You worked for a library. Did they ever check first to make sure some other library had a copy? Did they warn that other library "we're getting rid of ours, please don't get rid of yours"?
‘“I think some faculty worry that everyone is going to discard willy nilly and then before you know it there won’t be anything left,” Walker said. “No, libraries have gotten together, research libraries and others, and joined a consortium called LOCKSS – Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe – and people have agreements like Harvard is the place that will always keep a print copy of x. And there’s multiple ones of all of it. So there’s backup in case Harvard gets blown away by a nor’easter or something.”’
https://dakotastudent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Apr-10....