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 would sort according to it’s relevance/value to it’s genre as well as the redundancy of the information contained.
Let an almighty google algorithm decide ❤️
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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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.
Weed out via the tolerance metric.
If a piece of writing is non fiction, and exists to foment hatred, bye-bye. mein kampf is not literature.
It is history though. Erasing it from history would make it harder to study how insane that man was, which is immediately apparent in basically any part of that book. In Germany, Mein Kampf is banned except for educational purposes, eg in history class. Nothing conveys just how bad Hitler was as effectively as his own writing.
In Germany, Mein Kampf is banned except for educational purposes, eg in history class.
Strictly speaking this is incorrect, although the situation is somewhat complicated. There are laws that can be and were used to limit its redistribution (mainly the rule against anti-constitutional propaganda), but there are dissenting judgements saying original prints from before the end of WW2 cannot fall under this, since they are pre-constitutional. One particular reprint from 2018 has been classified as “liable to corrupt the young”, but to my knowledge this only means it cannot be publicly advertised.
What is interesting though is how distribution and reprinting was prevented historically, which is copyright. As Hitlers legal heir the state of Bavaria held the copyright until it expired in 2015 and simply didn’t grant license to anything except versions with scholarly commentary. But technically since then anybody can print and distribute new copies of the book. If this violates any law will then be determined on a case-by-case basis after the fact.
