I like that librarians watch Burn Notice.
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It occurs to me that maybe a study could be done. Compare the choices of the algorithm with that of n librarians, over time t. See how they compare. The statistics would have to be done carefully. It probably would cost big bucks, so the chances of this actually happening are small, I guess.
Yeah, sounds like these librarians are huge fans of things that the general public doesn’t actually care about…
From the article:
"…then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library’s patrons…
…to teach it how to weight the circulation data to reflect the on-the-ground intelligence and historical perspective they had on their libraries, their collections and their patrons…"
These are possibly, but not necessarily, the same thing. What if the books the librarians loved were
https://www.librarything.com/series/The+Brady+Bunch
…
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That’s sad. A small, well-curated collection will always be more useful than a large collection of mostly crap.
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Agreed! 
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At least also keep A Fire Upon Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Come on over to my house to read if you want, though I guess I should invite the library patrons only able to read one of a loose trilogy. I have the Realtime novels, a bunch of collections and The Witling, but not Grimm’s world. What critical works would you have included?
I do not throw anything out in my library so I do have a problem with too many books.
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Thanks for the info! Stick around…there are many interesting non-library-related conversations going on in this forum too.
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…Or filing them…The amount of labor saved by going to computer cataloging is NON-trivial.
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[quote=“GaleciaGroup, post:79, topic:92105”]
I hope you don’t mind my sharing my experience!
[/quote]Like with every librarian, I’m also fascinated by any experiences you might have decorating, say, a book cart and using it for a choreographed drill piece…
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And the standards for keeping stuff is different across different disciplines…Computer books from the 90s are more outdated than mathematics books from the 50s. Certainly within a discipline the circulation history of a title can be a very useful piece of information when weeding. We’re pretty rigorous about getting rid of older editions when we own the newer edition. Space is finite or decreasing, and it is really quite inefficient to have shelves that are totally full so that you have to shift just to fit a new book in.
And of course the “digitize everything” crowd usually don’t realize two things:
1.) Just how labor intensive digitization can be when you’re talking about a LARGE collection.
2.) The library simply does not have the right to digitize entire volumes that are still under copyright, and the vast majority of the collection is covered by “perpetual on the installment plan” copyright.
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If you were using a card catalog after the 1960s, you just saw the version for human eyes. Libraries were doing machine readable cataloging back then.
Back in the 80s when I worked in the photoduplication division of the Library of Congress the first step of “preservation microfilming” for most of the old, brittle books was to Guillotine the bindings. After the QC people had reviewed the film, the original pages were discarded. So “preservation” in this case really was destruction. But it worked better than their attempt at “Mass deacidification,” using DEZ.
Well my father used to work in the MARC development office in the 60s. I will say, that the OLD typeset cards from LoC were more pleasant to read than the monospaced ones from OCLC.
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Ha ha! Love Bookcart Drill Team!
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This is not heroic man vs. machine. This is fraud and hoarding. The suburban Florida branch is not housing some great work of fiction that will come back into vogue or cost an insane amount of money to replace. The average user in the system there checks out 24 books a year- chuck finley was on pace for over 3,000.
Decisions of what new titles to order is often made on use of current materials (or should be!) and this practice also throws off future ordering, wasting those precious funds on more books that people don’t want to read. This is not a practice to emulate. If you want to “save” books, market them. Recommend them, display them, put them in the newsletter. We cannot simply be a warehouse for dust collectors.
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I work in an old pseudo-library that still has its old card catalog–there are cards in there from the early 1900s and potentially older cards than that. They’re quite beautiful to look at…
“Maps of segregated coal lands in Howe-Poteau district, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory, with description of unleased segregated coal lands; by J.A. Taff, 1904”.
Most of the cards are newer than this one, but finding the old ones is always a treat.
It’s not your age! Serendipity! Fucken serendipity! It’s one of the few reasons I don’t like my e-reader as there are no shelves to browse other than a title list sorted by author or date published.
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So, no photos of your team?
This is the criteria that most librarians use currently for weeding. I didn’t get to see what type of books the algorithm chose for weeding as opposed to what the library staff wanted to keep, but it may be things that are of local interest, but don’t get checked out often. Some things here don’t get used more than a few times a decade, but we would want to keep them.
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I’m old enough to remember card catalogues. I never really got the hang of them, although I did and do think they’re pretty neat. A small part of the local national archives I regularly use is still card catalogued (due mainly, I think, to chronic and perpetual under-funding rather than the inherent awesomeness of cards) and it’s quite interesting to browse through it - I’ve had quite a few serendipitous moments reading the extra info recorded on those cards.
One thing I do miss is the return date stamp flap in the back of library books. I constantly lose the little receipt thing they give you now, and it was also neat looking at all the stamps and imagining all the previous readers.
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Somewhere I have some cards from a defunct card catalog that have Cyrillic lettering which is a neat thing. I wondered who had a Cyrillic typewriter although back in the day some publishers or vendors (like the defunct Victor Kamkin, and good riddance–but that’s another story) made catalog cards that they sent with the books.
I miss the little drawers.
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