I always use it as my bookmark–since I often have trouble finding any of the actual bookmarks I own 
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Surely this would depend on the size of the library?
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Oftentimes I go to the Library to read books, not to check them out. What does your data show you in that regard? I know there are others like me, we talk to each other. I do take the occasional book home, yes, but most of my reading in Libraries is a result of wanting to explore literature and art. This story kind of makes me sad. Why would a library want to get rid of its purpose? Libraries aren’t sustainable by design! IMHO they shouldn’t even collect data, let alone use it for making decisions, or trust software that uses data collected at libraries.
What should a technologically enhanced library do? I can think of -
*tracking books so they aren’t lost
*making copies upon copies upon copies of books
*digesting information contained in books to make queries easier
Why track users? Don’t care. Just show me where the book is on a map. It might be an interesting job to bop around town and collect overdue books. Probably cheaper than software licenses.
Why track who/when/where/why books checked out? Copies are free, make plenty to satiate demand, keep a hard copy local for perusal and unlimited digital copies for at home consumption.
Why paygate any information these days? The whole ‘industry’ of allowing flow of information in exchange for currency is deprecated. Making copies of information is so incredibly cheap and fast, it is truly a wonder why anyone would purchase or paygate anything information related these days. Yes, please, patronize the artist. Keep them warm, fed and sheltered, let them want for nothing - but this is a relatively cheap endeavour. An industry built upon an artist’s back is an unnecessary one. The artist and their indulgences can be satiated fully without having to corporatise, hybridise, or apply business models.
Think of a world where Libraries are democratised, where a consumer could vote their conscience with their choice of what art they would like to consume, where they could request the library make available art pertaining to even their most whimsical desire. I’ve always seen the Library as a place of discovery, not some brick box on the side of the road to scoff at and say ‘why not just google it?’ … It’s the place you go when you don’t know what to google.
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I was a page/shelver in a very conservative and rich area of LA. One day I’m shelving and I see Che Guevara’s field manual for guerrilla warfare. I went to see when it was last checked out: 15 years ago or so, as I recall. So I checked it out myself
1.) 'Cuz I really wanted to read it, and did.
2.) I wanted that book to stay on the shelf in that library, frequented by old white Republicans (and some genuinely cool old rich people too).
Like skr1, I like to buy certain obscure items at yard sales, library sales, etc. A couple years later, I’m browsing the cardboard boxes full of donated and weeded books at the Friends of the Library sale, and there it was: for 50 cents. Hell yea I bought it.
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To an extent, but for the smaller libraries it was more affordable to buy cards printed from the MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) than to hire a cataloger.
The calculation would be different for the smallest, all volunteer libraries.
This issue is more complex than just trying to “save” books. Not to be “punny”, but the other issues that go along with this situation involves public trust, falsifying public record and possibly “cooking the books”. City Libraries are paid by the county for every book that is checked out. So fake book checkouts are fraudulent, costing tax payers money. Only a handful of deleted books may need to be repurchased in the future for one branch, not a big expense compared to a library fraudulently checking out thousands and thousands of books…if all County and City Libraries are doing this, it adds up. Government needs to be fiscally responsible and accountable when it comes to tax payer money.
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In the Lake County Florida case, it isn’t that simple. When speaking of human judgement, it is criminal to falsify public record. The use of data can be used to “cook the books” for nefarious reasons as well. When you create a fake card with a fake empty lot address and a fake driver license number to check out thousands of books to “save” them, but the reality is maybe only a handful of those books would ever need to be repurchased, human judgement IS the issue.
Except nobody here is denying that what was happening here was fraudulent. I’m also not speaking on the economics since I don’t have any knowledge of how that works.
My point is that data gathered through automated collection methods is just that – data. Relying on that data as some infallible source of decision making is how you end up making uninformed and poor decisions. Speaking from my experience as a software developer I cannot even begin to count how many times I’ve seen bad decisions made because of relying only on automated data. Data is great, but when you remove the human element and ignore the actual people out there, you end up making dumb decisions.
I’d trust a librarian’s judgement about what should/shouldn’t be culled versus relying solely on algorithmic determinations since this is what they know.
I don’t normally agree with Cory on many things, but I’m in complete agreement with him here.
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As I stated, the lake County issue is complex. No one was relying solely on algorithmic determinations. Trusting someone with the Librarian title who has no problem breaking the law by falsifying public record is perhaps a tad dubious.
IAAL (I Am A Librarian) and you are absolutely right.
The realtime/peace war novels and the Fire trilogy are the essentials imo. Weirdly, they do have “The collected works of Vernor Vinge”, which has all his shorter stories from between 1966 and 2006, except Grimm’s Story and True Names. It’s quite neat, there are small annotations from Vinge of the story behind the story.
It does seem bizare to keep Children and not Fire Upon and Deepness in the Sky. Especially given it’s no where near as good as the other two.
Fortunately I have digital copies of them all, but I always check the V section of second hand book shops just in case.
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Everyone seems to be overlooking something here. Decent weeding software doesn’t just look at a library’s own catalog and usage stats- it can also compare a library’s holdings against a larger database (OCLC’s Worldcat, in the case of academic libraries) to determine whether a library’s copy of something is the only existent copy, whether there are other copies within the state that can be borrowed via interlibrary lending, etc. Obviously, there are limitations to the data, but algorithms CAN be a tool to help determine rarity.
This is exactly it. Everyone should read this.
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