My point was, Flatland is itself modern. But there’s this annoying tendency to use modern to mean something from the past few years, as opposed to the preceding years, when modern can mean anything from the past several centuries.
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Modern- pre 1815
Recent- anything afterwards.
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You mean, like the BIBLE? (evil grin)
Very few things rile me up as much anyone who thinks reading and learning is a bad thing and must be stopped.
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Let me guess: one of the books removed was Fahrenheit 451 Amiright?
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“The Library of Unborrowed Books” is a touring art exhibit that may benefit from this. Perhaps a library could be made with the removed books?
Seems to be a common complaint by librarians: Libraries Under Threat
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And the students have to buy it themselves (to save the district money) from Amazon or they don’t get credit.
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You seem to be missing the entire point. Sure, many libraries need to cull their collection due to space constraints. But this effort seems more like hiring the Three Stooges to wallpaper your house and then cater a party complete with creme pies. Probably not the end result that was looked for.
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yeah, but a lot of these books weren’t on the basics. i mean, i suspect you didn’t pick Knuth at uniform random, and even Knuth is a pretty awful place to start learning algorithms today, though it should still be read eventually.
for example, many AI books from the period are just embarrassing relics which mostly involve trying to get really slow computers with a few kilobytes of RAM to do things AI researchers of the time thought were important, but really turned out not to be. and then you have the “introduction to computing for the layperson”-type books which, well, do we really need a book illustrating that, someday, you’ll be able to make video calls from your phone?
meh. in terms of pure utility, you could probably toss 90% pretty safely.
Like OCR. Or communication over landlines.
“The Art of Computer Programming” is still relevant. But “ProBASIC 2.1 for the C=64” is just gathering dust at this point. At some point the library has to say the limited shelf space is being wasted and discard the book. Computer books are always in danger of going out of date fast. Even books from 2000 (Introduction to HTML, now covering version 3.2!) can be pretty badly obsolete.
In general, books that cover concepts instead of technologies last longer (“Data Structures in C” is almost certainly still relevant, while “Borland C 2.0 Console Programming” is not) but even those books tend to be less relevant while they are new. I imagine there are hundreds of “Learn the X Framework” books out there now that are incredibly relevant at the moment and will be utterly obsolete in a couple of years.
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what’s your point? sure, some of it we kept, but if I had the option of a 40-year-old textbook on OCR versus even just Wikipedia and its external links, i’d take the latter. technology isn’t just building onto old stuff; occasionally, the premises are rebuilt when something more elegant comes along, and/or when computers get fast enough. an old book on OCR is basically just an historical curiosity at this point.
anyway i was talking more about things like SHRDLU. really inspiring at the time, but nowadays it belongs in a history book, not a technical one.
Only that they are the history books, and literature is informative of its time. ‘To Kill a Mockingird’ is a slice of a bygone era, and still relevant. Yes, a current perspective on SHRDLU and its descendants is preferable for most current readers. But the perspective and language used back in the day is fascinating and informative in retrospect. Terms like ‘machine vision’ have changed meaning. This particular topic is interesting to me, and someone else might be interested in the historical perspective of some other field.
I agree that most of this material should be culled. I’ll take them!
sure, i agree. i just wouldn’t begrudge a high school library getting rid of them to make space.
i’ve read most of vol. 1 and about half of vol. 2. i don’t know if they are ‘worth’ reading, but Knuth has enough interesting asides to make me not regret it. overall, my favorite is fascicle 2, “Generating All Tuples and Permutations,” of his to-be-released-real-soon-now vol. 4, both in terms of technical content and historical discussion.
but, yeah, they are most useful as references. learning computer science primarily from them is not exactly an efficient use of one’s time.
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Yes, and you could probably declare 90% of all planes to be safe for departure, skipping the cumbersome checklist which wastes only trained professionals time. So I guess we can send in two city workers into each plane, one who reads the list and another one who says “Check!”.
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meh, the article was really vague: heavy on allegations and light on details. i’m just skeptical of how bad this could really have been, even in the worst reasonable case. it’s seems like a bureaucratic screw-up, not Fahrenheit 451.
What’s vague about the article?
“Several district librarians told board members that district workers, who lack library training, are entering libraries and removing thousands of books that had been rarely checked out or were older than 2000, including classics, often without the knowledge or input of the librarian on staff.”
Some bright mind thought he could do a better job than the librarians in deciding which books to remove and which not, by very simpleminded criteria.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least, though, like teaching at an elementary school, running a library is obviously an easy job. Why, they do nothing but check in, sort and check out books. Any supermarket staffer can do this stuff!
(I also did my website designs in Word, no need to pay big bucks for it.)
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OK, they lack library training; that’s not very meaningful, since they’re just the grunts carrying the boxes. Are they taking orders from someone who had library training and just made a decision the subordinate librarians disagreed with? Did someone lose the memo? Did some newly appointed bureaucrat have a power trip or just want to spite someone? Was it a secret operation by the reptilians to deprive high school students in Racine, WI of some of their books? I have no freaking clue.
This is even without getting to the point where the superiors deny the orders. Sure, that’s “exactly what they would say,” but it’s also possible that it’s simply true. Maybe someone screwed up the mail merge, and they emptied out the wrong school. Who knows?
This article could be titled: “Superiors at Large Bureaucracy Do Something Objectionable to their Subordinates, either through Malice or Incompetence”.
Not really. A comparative act would be a school district deciding (without consulting the teachers) that grades K-3 could do without history, grades 4-6 didn’t need to teach math, and grades 7-8 could just lay off on social studies.
That’s the volume and variety of books being discussed. Entire sections were cleared, and they weren’t just “old” or somehow “unusable”.
If all the non-fiction books were cleared out from a library because no one was checking them out, that’s partially thanks to the internet, but that doesn’t mean those books are out-of-date or that their information is wrong. In fact, they may provide better information than that which can easily be found on the internet (which we all know has no factual errors at all - just today I updated Snopes!).
It’s important that reference books be kept available so that people can be certain that information found on the internet is correct. Newer information may overtake that in print, but errors in wording or other flaws can be found by checking a source book. A common mistake made on sites is linking to the wrong picture, and if someone is trying to identify an animal, a book may be priceless for comparison before you find the best image online.
It also seems that the workers used personal preference to decide what to keep and what to toss, “At Case High School, 2,505 books were removed, including: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Holy Bible, Pable Picasso: A Modern Master, and The Iliad & The Odyssey of Homer.” This article includes photos of one cleared library and should better explain why the librarians are so very upset. So, it’s really a much bigger problem than simply an “objectionable” act.
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OMG, it’s so much worse than I assumed. I hate to use this expression (considering the subject), but it’s a good example of a picture being worth a thousand words.
I know with our libraries, especially the ones in schools, books are often read there instead of being signed out to read at home. Just because a book hadn’t been checked out for a while doesn’t mean it hadn’t been read recently.
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