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.
A deprecation marker is a "this will be removed"; these markers are "this will be removed if nobody reads them even with this marker in them".
The library is highlighting a few titles for increased visibility to ask, “would this pique a reader’s interest if they knew about it, or is this generally bad?”
Without this stage, the library would expunge more genuinely interesting titles.
I’ve always kinda felt the role of a library is for recall rather than precision
Agree on the language lawyering, too. ;-)
The cost of maintaining a book is much, much less than a product feature!
Frankly, parent borrows the books and reads them. Far from malicious, maybe a bit quirky, this kind of behavior needs not be corrected, especially from an anonymous jay like yourself.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...
I often find myself drowning in things like the Qld state library photo archives of the suburbs of Brisbane. They name street junctions which still exist, you pull up a modern photo in google maps, you look at the old one with Trams and wooden houses.. And another..
Ni bheidh ar leitheidi aris ann.
It translates as "Our likes will not be there again." and is originally from An toileánach (1929) - https://archive.org/details/toileanach0000ocro about remote island life.
I want to pay a courtesy caul..
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.
Most of my batch books are from Standard Ebooks which, while a noble project, has a serious addiction to publishing dreck no one should waste time reading.