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.
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.
This is such a a complicated subject that some people dedicate the majority of their library career to it. Most collection development/maintenance methods are somewhat based on MUSTIE (misleading, ugly, superseded, trivial, irrelevant, or obtained elsewhere) and CREW. A free PDF about CREW from the Texas state library is a good place to start. https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ld/pubs/crew/index.html
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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.
