I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas.

However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. )

They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit the library, catalogue and storage isn't free and endless.

So they have a signal that no-one is borrowing these books, and they can replace it with books that do get borrowed.

Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes.

In software development terms, imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused. You want to clean up the code so you mark some endpoints as deprecated and list that in your change log.

Now imagine there's a developer who looks at the changelog for deprecation warnings, then goes out their way to develop apps that call them.

"Unloved books" might seem more romantic than un-called API endpoints, but the library needs to rotate and refresh to stay healthy.

If you want unloved books, then pick them up for next to nothing from the sale outside the library, most libraries will practically give away books they've rotated out, and you're actually doing them a favour "disposing" of them while likely giving them a token amount of money for it.

There’s something about resurrecting underloved media, isn’t there? I recently did a Catherine Louisa Pirkis collection[1] for Standard Ebooks; most of her stories had scans on archive.org / Hathi that I could use, but “Trooping with Crows”[2] was only available from the British Library as a physical copy. We paid for it to be scanned and I’ve uploaded those to archive.org now.[3] I’d be surprised if anyone had read it in the last decade, if not longer, yet it’s a perfectly good Victorian genre romance with a strong lead.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...

[3] https://archive.org/details/12641-cc-26-001

A surprise to see Flann O'Brien pop up in the comments. While we're here, I will say that At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman are fantastic books, I highly recommend them.

This site is vaguely addictive in a dopamine feeding sense. What will the next image be? ...One more click won't hurt... :-)

  Ni bheidh ar leitheidi aris ann. 

Sounds similar to the aspiration of randomly picking an out-of-the way restaurant in hopes that you are going to discover a great little hole-in-the-wall. Needless to say, I suspect any lack of regret in either case might be attributable to cognitive biases.

> Never regretted reading them

Interesting! I'm surprised to hear you've had that experience. I pick out books at the library largely by the cover & back blurb, not by whether they're popular or well reviewed or whatever. And to be honest, I've picked out a lot of crap this way, where I turn it back in after just a chapter or two. I suspect that frequency of being checked out & popularity/well-reviewed-ness are correlated. So I also suspect (admittedly without evidence) that my algorithm of picking somewhat randomly means I pick out books that are not popular with some frequency, and I've definitely regretted many of my choices. So it's surprising to me that you haven't had any that were terrible.

Struggling to find the carpenter’s story, do you remember the title by any chance? Thanks!

I opened this and thought hoooooooold on, I know that; I have a framed A2 print of it on the wall to my left.

One of my favourite parts of my trip to Japan (only been once so far), the tide was out at the time so I stood under that Torii gate and have a few photos of it of my own that I use as wallpapers.

The colors look so different here:

https://nipponprints.com/images/tsuchiya-koitsu/summer-moon-...

(non-deeplink: https://nipponprints.com/tsuchiya-koitsu/summer-moon-at-miya... )

1930s is the tail end of Shin Hanga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin-hanga

In a "that's so recent" or a "that's so old" kind of way?

wow, that really is lovely. my favourite one so far.

so beautiful

I love stumbling upon these kinds of things, especially if they've been long abandoned. I feel like an archaeologist digging up artifacts of a forgotten tribe, or perhaps an explorer in an abandoned hospital

As a konbini enthusiast whenever I leave my continent… Link for the konbini storefront channel?

There's a scheduled task that runs every month to pull the view data from Google Analytics:

https://github.com/art-institute-of-chicago/data-aggregator/...

https://github.com/art-institute-of-chicago/data-aggregator/...

The site hasn't been hugged to death yet,

There's a couple of those for YouTube.

https://vid404.com/ is for videos with zero views. It generates search queries for finding them.

For videos with low views there's https://petittube.com/ (loads a random video with low view count) and http://astronaut.io/ (which has an "automatic stream" of videos).

Seems likely that Spotify is stuffed full of "songs" with zero listens now.

Perhaps a quirk of the implementation - maybe the site doesn't server-side render links that lead to these items (though many bots run a full browser now), maybe they only track usage client-side or only in their mobile app.

The site calls the API directly (www.artic.edu), so yeah, probably it will ruin^W change the metric. It's probably the creator's idea?

Some, ahem, video sites, have "Popular videos". Of course the videos that end up there get more views and get even more popular...

We're not worried about ruining this metric. We want people to see art.

Querying the API, there seem to be 112998 artworks with this label as of this moment.

(I'm deliberately not posting the direct API call in case it's expensive for them to run. Documentation is found here: https://api.artic.edu/docs/#fields-collections-artworks)

If the views are all real views it's hardly "inflating" anything.

...I can't work out what this is.

this one? https://www.artic.edu/artworks/192466/floating-chairs-flying...

If you clicked through and viewed the artwork details page then it will be in the "recently viewed" collection at the bottom of the page.

Wouldn’t a view count with range filtering provide the best flexibility?

why, though? the current version is the interesting property

Opposite of a 429 right!

We're having ongoing issues with bot traffic, so we're constantly tweaking our Cloudflare settings.

if i turn off my vpn, it works, but the vpn is cloudflare's own WARP. strange

There is no irony. Drawing attention to these works is likely the reason this bool was introduced in the first place.

Is it really an artificial increase? Presumably the humans of HN are naturally viewing these artworks.

They could monetize it by having a Pay-Per-Unview button that lets you pay to unview things you liked and want others to see.

A shame but maybe also the point? If the under appreciated art is being viewed, that sounds great.

Gauguin, Manet, Rembrandt and Whistler sketches, Weston nudes, Harry Callahan photos, amazing things indeed.

People generally seem quite uninterested in preparatory sketches/studies/maquettes by famous artists, which is absolute madness, to my mind. Unfinished and transitory work is much more interesting to me. Photographers' contact sheets especially.

I read that some people are having trouble with cloudflare and VPNs. Being an art school, I imagine they’re disinclined to make it easier for a bazillion people every day to thoughtlessly point a scraper at their site to vacuum everything up for training data.

Congratulations Citizen, you have complied with the mainthink.

We don't care about click counts. We just want people to see art.

Pedant here. Using "for instance" here implies that you will be providing an example of how begging the question and raising the question are not the same thing. You've provided a definition and a source, not an example.