The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.
The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change.
That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.
> The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today
We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.
And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?
What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?
What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?
Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)
Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.
> Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
> The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
re: saving books, at a personal level, I try to use the excuse of work to find, read, and do stuff with old books,
https://1517.substack.com/p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval
And yes, people still care. And people who care do things.
"Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on.
Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...."
https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...
I don't think many Liberians like the idea that they have to do it; it is just one of those things that has to be done, sadly.
Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.
The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.
If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.
It is pretty standard procedure.