Library Creates Fake Patron Records To Avoid Book-Purging (heraldnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Chuck Finley checked out 2,361 books from a Florida library in just nine months, increasing their total circulation by 3.9%. But he doesn't exist. "The fictional character was concocted by two employees at the library, complete with a false address and driver's license number," according to the Orlando Sentinel. The department overseeing the library acknowledges their general rule is "if something isn't circulated in one to two years, it's typically weeded out of circulation." So the fake patron scheme was concocted by a library assistant working with the library's branch supervisor, who "said he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf." But according to the newspaper the branch supervisor "said the same thing is being done at other libraries, too."

Comments

Its not a fictional name, just an alias

[Anonymous Coward]

His real name is Sam Axe.

Re:Its not a fictional name, just an alias

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 FTW
That whooshing sound is that flying over everyone elses head. I was definitely thinking it too though.

Re: Its not a fictional name, just an alias

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want a gold star? Congratulations for being able to remember the alias of a character on a TV show - you've finally accomplished something you can be truly proud of!

Re:Its not a fictional name, just an alias

[Anonymous Coward]

and was a real baseball player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Its not a fictional name, just an alias

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! That really means something.

Re: Its not a fictional name, just an alias

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed that burn

Good for them

[willoughby]

Displaying initiative and ingenuity in order to work around idiotic managerial policies & decisions. Give 'em a raise!

Re:Good for them

[elrous0]

It's a heartwarming tale in the summary, but the article implies that there may have been a somewhat less noble reason for the fake patron (emphasis mine):

nine city-run libraries that are part of the Lake County library system and receive a percentage of their funding based on circulation levels.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame they'll probably get fired and maybe even charged with an illegality.

I'm sure it is illegal to create fake people in any official recordkeeping, no matter how trivial said recordkeeping is.
If it involves a 3rd party paying for services, it probably falls under it somewhere.
I dunno. Might fall under company matters only. I am not a lawyer.

Re:Good for them

[dangle]

This is one possibility, but the "That way I wouldn't have to repurchase them again in the future" argument seems pretty weak, given that once most books have their day, circulation drops to zero for years (which is why it does make sense to purge books from smaller libraries). I think the more likely possibility is that it was a scheme to boost circulation numbers to protect their budget, as suggested in TFA.

Re:Good for them

[v1]

If they were just trying to bolster funding, one would expect that they would inflate checkout rates for more popular titles then so as not to draw suspicion. Despite there being other possible options for "ulterior motive", "looking for a fix to offset a stupid decision by upper management" (or what someone passionately believed was a bad decision) looks like the frontrunner.

The policy's primary reasoning/justification was probably "clearing shelf space to make room for new books", so ultimately the need for that will end up getting re-examined. That's the risk you take when going behind management's back. You have to be sure that when your actions finally get exposed (and they almost always DO), you not only need to be right, but you need to be show to be unambiguously right. (and sometimes that's not even enough - they're management after all, and just like you they're allowed to make mistakes occasionally) Sometimes managers have a caretaker above them that will shelter them from fallout due to ineptitude, so either it doesn't matter or they don't care if they're wrong.

So it's difficult to defend what may have been a very well-intentioned act without substantial evidence to show that it was justified or perhaps necessary. I just don't think we have enough evidence at this point. Maybe later.

Re:Good for them

[meerling]

Most databases of people have at least one, if not several, fake entries. They are used as tests and filler. If it were illegal, every company out there would be utterly screwed.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

So why make a fake person? Surely, a library clerk may loan books under his own name?

Re:Good for them

[meerling]

You may be right, but librarians have a nearly genetic imperative to prevent the loss of any book, even if nobody has read it in centuries.
It's also a point of professional pride and the loss of books is at odds with their stated goals.
If you really want to see what it's like, hold a book burning in front of your local library.

Re:Good for them

[Dutch Gun]

By holding onto clearly unpopular titles (not one checkout in a year or two), they were ensuring that potentially newer and more popular titles had no space in their library. I'm not sure how anyone could believe this was in the best interest of the library.

I can only think of a few motivations. An arrogant: "We know what's best for you." or "Everything new is crap" attitude, or perhaps purging books simply means more work for the librarians, and so this seemed easier to them. I'm leaning towards the latter explanation, as a kid's book titled "Why Do My Ears Pop?" doesn't exactly seem like high literature worth preserving for all time.

George Dore, the library’s branch supervisor who was put on administrative leave for his part in the episode, said he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf. He said the same thing is being done at other libraries, too.

And this makes no sense. If the books were not being checked out for years at a time, why would they have to later re-purchase the book?

Re:Good for them

[tsa]

Even if they were made illegal that would be quite hard to enforce because a well made fake entry is impossible to distinguish from a real one without knowing anything about it beforehand.

Re:Good for them

[Mikkeles]

I often check out old classics and not so popular books (especially poetry and non-fiction) that I'm not interested in (re)reading at the moment just to hopefully achieve this same effect. There are works, even those I don't particularly care for, that should always be available.

Re:Good for them

[HornWumpus]

Because they are pushing a agenda.

Someone will be along to checkout 'It takes a village' any year now. They just know it.

Re:Good for them

[Dutch Gun]

The article does point out a bit later that this particular library didn't participate in that program, so it appear that there wasn't a financial motivation. This was mentioned, as it may be a motivation for OTHER libraries doing the same thing.

Re:Good for them

[Dutch Gun]

Ah, of course! It's clearly a plot by the DNC to promote their "fake books." I have a suspicion of what deviltry we'd find in that innocent-sounding "Why Do My Ears Pop?" book:

Susie: "Hey Mom, why do my ears pop?"

Mom: "Because Republicans are bad and want to hurt you. What you're feeling is the concentrated evil of failed Republic policies leftover from the Reagan era."

Susie: *cries*

Re:Good for them

[ooloorie]

Displaying initiative and ingenuity in order to work around idiotic managerial policies & decisions. Give 'em a raise!

Sure, it seems pretty harmless for library books, but it's the same kind of "initiative and ingenuity" that causes government budgets to balloon and government services to deteriorate.

Libraries need to comply with the rules set by the people who provide the money for them. And keeping books around that people don't read means that space isn't available for books that people actually want.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you know nothing about public library employees or public employees in general.

Re: Good for them

[HornWumpus]

Sounds like you agree with them.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

In my town, all but one of the Librarians attend the same church. Every single book related to the Occult, Mysticism, magic, etc. is checked out... to a member of the same Church. The books get checked out once, then slowly accrue late fees for a year or two, until they finally equal the purchase price of the book. Then they get reported as "lost" and the Curch member pays for the copy.
Then the book is usually not reordered because it was only checked out once and thus has a low circulation score.

They do it as a way to censor material their Church finds objectional. There's a few things which will always get restocked regardless, but they are willing to pay a few bucks a year to keep people from being able to get it. And they also have a small cleaning supply closet stacked full of books which are listed as "on the shelf" but can never actually be found.

Re:Good for them

[HornWumpus]

The test data has last names that start with 'ZZ', duh.

You'd be surprised how often test data makes it into live systems. You'd also be surprised how many 'reports' are hard coded to filter out all the names starting with 'ZZ'. I surprised nobody has been able to leverage it into a real computer crime.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

or "Mein Kampf", signed by D. Trumpf.

So what are you really trying to say?

Re:Good for them

[tsa]

Not in the database of the museum I work in.

Re:Good for them

[johannesg]

  You'd also be surprised how many 'reports' are hard coded to filter out all the names starting with 'ZZ'. I surprised nobody has been able to leverage it into a real computer crime.

Crimes committed by people whose name starts with ZZ don't show up in official reports, for some reason.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems pointless given the ubiquity of the internet. The library is a lot of work when you're a Google search away from all manner of objectionable content and the internet is much harder to censor than a library.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be glad that they are expending money fighting the good fight to ensure that homeless people and poor children who will never have any influence in the world aren't exposed to dangerous ideas. Meanwhile: the next generation of politicians and lawyers are downloading whatever they want to their kindle and nook.

The alternative is they might give that same money to political action committees to lobby against education funding and for private school vouchers.

Re:Good for them

[Locke2005]

Yes and no. There is a need for testing and training for all databases, some organizations create test databases for that, but less imaginative places just insert fake records in the actual database to use for testing and training.

Re:Good for them

[lucm]

The policy's primary reasoning/justification was probably "clearing shelf space to make room for new books"

Yes get rid of that Steinbeck crap so there's more room for extra copies of "The Secret" and "Fifty shades of Grey". It's called the Blockbuster Syndrome.

Re:Good for them

[Locke2005]

Damn! That explains why I can't find any ZZ Top in the library CD catalogue!

Re:Good for them

[johannesg]

Some people see books as the central repository of human knowledge and culture. They believe that books are our history; the thing that will one day resurrect civilisation if we accidentally wipe it out. And also the final thing we leave behind, a form of immortality even as our bodies perish. _That's_ your motivation: they have a deep love and respect for books and don't want them to be destroyed.

They are the people who lovingly collected a copy of every single book in Skyrim, possibly for each of their mansions just to be safe. They don't play the game for exploring dungeons or exterminating dragons or whatever, they just go around collecting books and building up libraries: https://www.reddit.com/r/skyri...

Those people come up with schemes for ensuring books remain in the collection, stacking them two rows deep or storing them off-site in a locker they pay for by themselves if that's what it takes. For them books don't need motivation; books are motivation.

Re:Good for them

[Locke2005]

"They have control of the public schools"??? You know most schoolbooks are the ones approved in that bastion of liberal thought know as Texas, right?

Re:Good for them

[HornWumpus]

No I don't, because it's a steaming pile of bullshit.

There are two 'major' curricula sets. Texas and California. For every right wing distortion in the Texas books there are three left wing distortions in the California books.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

You're too stupid to write in public.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Every year there is a fifty shades or equivalent. You don't get rid of Steinbeck to make room for Fifty Shades, you get rid of thr past year's Fifty Shade's equivalent.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same Mom who regularly goes to the local health food store and chakra balancing practitioner to buy Cherokee Hair Tampons and refuses to give little Susie medicine developed by "Big Pharma".

Re:Good for them

[Harlequin80]

What is the limit of books that the library is able to carry and are they at / close to that limit? Your whole argument is based on the premise that the library is full and that stopping these books being removed blocked others.

If the library's total lend rate has dropped dramatically you may be in the situation where there are not enough borrowers to turn over the full catalogue in any reasonable time period. From the TFA they are only lending something in the vicinity of 65000 times a year. Where I live you can take 20 books at a time per person so they are only looking at something like 8-10 people per day.

According to their online catalogue search they have ~23,000 books. It would be normal to expect the best known blockbusters to be borrowed multiple times in any period so with just a 3 times multiplier on their collection it is very likely that actually quite historically popular books will sit on a shelf for 2 years.

Re:Good for them

[Harlequin80]

Their online catalogue search - http://catalog.mylakelibrary.o...

Re:Good for them

[Harlequin80]

Are the library shelves at capacity?

Re:Good for them

[AthanasiusKircher]

You may be right, but librarians have a nearly genetic imperative to prevent the loss of any book, even if nobody has read it in centuries.

I think the personal record I have for circulating books is a book that hadn't been checked out in 82 years. It was actually a really useful book which ended up providing a significant discussion in a research article I was writing -- and not just for historical interest.

Well, that's if you don't count archival sources, some of which probably hadn't been examined in significantly longer periods. But that's another story.

It's also a point of professional pride and the loss of books is at odds with their stated goals.

That's not quite true. All librarians who operate small local branches are familiar with periodic weeding. It's expected, and it's a skill that's taught to anyone with library degrees. That said, most librarians probably would prefer to keep books in stock -- even in closed storage stacks -- rather than discard them. But that's not generally feasible to do for long periods except at very large and well-funded university libraries.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily, just disagree with you because your "expertise" is based on a couple friends who aren't present and your argument is a stretch. But then, this is Slashdot 2017.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you want to read Huckleberry Finn or something equally lowbrow...

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are both ignorant and an idiot.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that this is a blanket policy that those books be dropped, not necessarily because they're bad books or because there's a new book that they need to find a home for. In many cases due to the classification systems used, the old book they get rid of isn't anywhere near the new book they're looking to find shelf space for. It doesn't much matter whether it's LOC or the Dewey Decimal System, in either case unless they're removing books from the same area, they aren't really freeing up space for new books.

Also, certain genres go in and out of style over time and certain books are useful, but not regularly used. It ought to be up to some human being to make judgments about how long to retain books. And ultimately, as I pointed out, the solution is usually to find the book in the same section that's been the longest without being checked out and remove that. Or at least look at what the book is covering. I doubt that a book on QBASIC is going to be of much use now.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes get rid of that Steinbeck crap so there's more room for extra copies of "The Secret" and "Fifty shades of Grey". It's called the Blockbuster Syndrome.

That's not how weeding works. Last years' "blockbusters" are the ones that get weeded out and replaced with this year's "blockbusters."

Classics will tend to stay around, especially titles that have gone out of print and can't be acquired from other sources via intra-library loan.

It isn't like librarians aren't actually professionals who have been thoughtfully working this stuff out for centuries.

Re:Good for them

[tepples]

So it isn't because "She's got legs, she knows how to use them." triggered some double amputees?

Re: Good for them

[MightyMartian]

You've made a claim for which you've provided no evidence whatsoever, and yet still manage to come out with this sort of petulent response.

Re:Good for them

[MightyMartian]

By "left wing distortion" you mean science books that discuss evolution and a 4.5 billion years old earth as facts.

Re:Good for them

[drinkypoo]

That's not how weeding works. Last years' "blockbusters" are the ones that get weeded out and replaced with this year's "blockbusters."
Classics will tend to stay around,

Unless nobody happens to rent them for a year. Maybe they get them from other sources, like project Gutenberg, so the demand is filled some other way. And then someone comes into the library in the middle of January and tries to check it out, and it's gone, because...

It isn't like librarians aren't actually professionals who have been thoughtfully working this stuff out for centuries.

...sometimes they get subjected to stupid policies that make it harder to do their jobs.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Community libraries are not storage vaults. They are living institutions that must keep up with their community's needs.

If their patrons are getting works from other sources then that's a good thing. The library should focus on the needs that are not otherwise being met.

Also your metric for weeding out books that haven't been used in just a year is wrong. The typical policy is to discard 80% of books that have not been checked out after 3 years. The other 20% of those books are still kept in circulation if they are notable, like Steinbeck.

Source: I am a librarian. My mother is a librarian. Her aunt worked her way up to head children's librarian for the state of kansas.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that was at the recovery center. The guy who was doing it got caught and was fired.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

I smell alternate agenda. They want to preserve books supporting their selected narrative and only purge those that disagree with it. Secondarily, they want to place an artificial choke point on incoming so that they can filter out books that disagree with their agenda. Happens all the time. These yahoos just got caught at it and are making up excuses to portray themselves as virtuous instead of insidious.

Re:Good for them

[mysidia]

Someone will be along to checkout 'It takes a village' any year now. They just know it.

Why are they using checkouts as the metric to decide on purges, anyways?

I pull books all the time, mostly non-fiction materials, and read from them, maybe take the notes and record the details I need for later reference for what i'm working on, and then put the book back on the shelf in the same slot I got it from.

At no point is it necessary to check most of the books out and take it out of the library.....
I sometimes do that, but it doesn't mean the books I didn't need to check-out were not useful.

Especially the periodical volumes, which for some reason... we're not allowed to checkout, anyways.

Re:Good for them

[arglebargle_xiv]

The test data has last names that start with 'ZZ', duh.

Great, so it's not OK to say that all Asians are bad drivers and all Mexicans are lazy, but it is OK to say that all people whose last names start with ZZ are test data.

Signed, Zebediah Zzymurgy.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

> mis-shelve
That is only possible because libraries are technically broken. Why do they stick a RFID in every book if I (nor they) can't see in real time on what shelf the book is? I want an app on my phone that tells me which books are actually present and where exactly, and a robot that gets me books from the magazine in a matter of minutes. I've seen books on file in libraries that don't exist and were probably stolen (or misplaced) years ago. I just don't get why they can't figure this out. Technically it shouldn't be a major problem. And when books in the library can be tracked in real time, the organizational cost of keeping many of them available vanishes in comparison to the benefit of offering a wide range of even obscure stuff.

Re:Good for them

[Dog-Cow]

Especially the periodical volumes, which for some reason... we're not allowed to checkout, anyways.

Periodicals are easily destroyed by mishandling. Books, even softcovers, can handle quite a bit more of a beating. Also, some periodicals cost more per issue than some hardcovers.

Re:Good for them

[johannesg]

Presumably the people that create an extra test database are not running Oracle, and are therefore free to do so...

Re:Good for them

[geekmux]

Displaying initiative and ingenuity in order to work around idiotic managerial policies & decisions. Give 'em a raise!

Today it's an "innocent" library creating fake citizens to save books. Tomorrow it's an "innocent" social media network creating fake citizens to destroy your reputation, a company, or voting process.

Perhaps we should think twice about asking the mayor about handing over the key to these fine upstanding citizens for their "heroic" activity, since rewarding this kind of bullshit can lead to support for other activities.

Re:Good for them

[hey!]

Yes get rid of that Steinbeck crap so there's more room for extra copies of "The Secret" and "Fifty shades of Grey". It's called the Blockbuster Syndrome.

It's probably worth noting that making blockbusters available does serve a legitimate purpose.

But libraries have been the target of political attacks in recent years.

Re:Good for them

[ooloorie]

If they aren't, there's something wrong with the library.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Crimes committed by people whose name starts with ZZ don't show up in official reports, for some reason.

But they are still remembered.

Re: Good for them

[tchdab1]

"...homeless people and poor children who will never have any influence in the world ..."

Wow. Check your bias at the door please - not having money or a home says nothing about your intelligence, capability, or desire to do good. I mean, look at our 5th avenue hillbilly president, offering an example of the opposite.
Actually I can't tell if you're tongue-in-cheek or serious.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes get rid of that Steinbeck crap so there's more room for extra copies of "The Secret" and "Fifty shades of Grey". It's called the Blockbuster Syndrome."
Which worked very well for Waldenbooks, Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc...

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

the older generations have been saying that about the younger for as long as humanity has been around.

Re:Good for them

[stoatwblr]

In a lot of cases the filler names are deliberately there to check for leaks.

Atlases and Dictionaries also have these kinds of canary entries. The idea being that if you need to prove copyrught infringement you can point to the fictional entries being copied.

Re:Good for them

[RockDoctor]

For the first time in the (large) handful of times I've heard "Skyrim", I'm now intrigued enough to ctually find out what it is that you can collect books in it. [Wikis] It's some sort of dungeons & dragons game? Online, possibly? What the flying fuck has that got to do with book collecting?

Re:Good for them

[HornWumpus]

That's different, a little bogus data to prove people who 'rented 'the list exceeded the license isn't what I'm on about. Fuck those list vendors BTW. If someone hasn't already setup a website so their clients can submit lists and validate them against other copies, they should. Of course it would likely be the vendors themselves, setting their own clients up.

I was only half joking about the 'ZZ'. Over 30 years, I've run into 3 places that used the 'ZZ' trick, they all had test accounts in the live system (2 had filters on the reports/queries to exclude the ZZs, one just had it all associated with a test op unit/vendors/etc).

It's a red flag. The _office staff_ are testing the software on the live systems (someone has to do it), IT is falling on it's face. Run away.

Re:Good for them

[omnichad]

libraries that don't exist and were probably stolen (or misplaced) years ago

That would be quite a feat.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow this talk about left wing distortions leads me to imagining a school history book that describes Stalin as a bold leader whose policies were proven victorious in the WW2 and praising the culture policies of East Germany as the most advanced at the time. It would be interesting to understand how Americans view the left and right wing political bias in schoolbooks, of course completely separated from religious biases if possible.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Working around stupid is not a bad thing.

Re: Good for them

[Coisiche]

You're correct but the statement was not about "intelligence, capability, or desire to do good", it was that those people would "never have any influence in the world". There will be intelligent and capable homeless and poor people with a desire to do good but they are extremely unlikely to ever have any influence because they are marginalized and denied opportunity. Yes, some have achieved things despite that background but I have a suspicion that the number who do so has been dropping every year for a while now.

Re:Good for them

[dywolf]

except for the minor detail that the most advanced states and nations of the world with the best performing economies and most satisfied workers trend to the left...

Re: Good for them

[david_thornley]

When the big Barnes & Noble superstores opened, one of their attractions was that they had depth, not just blockbusters. Their sheer size meant that they could have a lot of different books.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

I would strongly disagree. My wife is a middle-school librarian and she routinely weeds her collection (removes books that do not circulate within a given time period) to provide as many books that the kids will be likely to check out in the space she has. The public librarians we know would largely subscribe to the same idea. If a book isn't of interest to the readers in an area, then make room for books that are.

Re:Good for them

[Providentia]

Checkouts are only one of many metrics used to decide on purges (or weeding, to use the library jargon). Other metrics include physical shape, timeliness, format considerations, shelf space, historical value, rarity, cost to replace or update, reviews, outdated content, and much more.

Public libraries in particular rely heavily on checkouts as weeding metrics because part of their mission is to responsibly use city and state funds to support their communities. If the materials are not being used, it is an indicator that the collection is not meeting the needs of the community, and thereby that the library may be failing its mission.

As for your habit of using materials in the library and re-shelving them instead of checking them out, many libraries keep "in-house use" statistics that factor into weeding decisions. However, it's only possible to track in-house use of materials if patrons place used materials on the wheeled carts available, rather than re-shelving the items themselves (with [much appreciated] best intentions).

Lastly, the periodicals (termed Reference in Libraryland) aren't available to checkout because they must be available for the community to refer to. (Periodicals refer to materials that are periodically issued, such as journals, magazines, and journals.) It's likely that multiple patrons will need materials such as encyclopedias and government documents at one time; their usage will correspond with timely events such as assignments and tax season, so it's important that they're available to everyone.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... you can pick up and carry off almost anything in the game, including the "books" which contain stories about history, fiction, myth, etc. about the game world. You can then put them on bookshelves in your in-game house. Thus "collecting books".

Re:Good for them

[ChrisMaple]

By "left wing distortion" I mean American history books that spend multiple pages on Harriet Tubman and give no mention at all to some of the early Presidents.

Re:Good for them

[ChrisMaple]

First they become rich. Then they become left. If they are left first, they never become rich.

Re:Good for them

[ChrisMaple]

It's common for small town libraries to be so crowded that wheelchairs can't get down the aisles between bookshelves. Some aisles have books stored on the floor because the shelves are full.

If the library is full now with 20,000 books, what will happen 50 years from now when the library has been buying 300 books a year?

Re:Good for them

[Harlequin80]

If that is the case then fair enough. I'm not in the US and all my local libraries are sprawling affairs with what feels like loads of empty space on the shelves. The main one near me doesn't even have bookshelves over 4ft high so you can see the whole place.

This is what my local library looks like inside - https://www.raeco.com.au/blogs...

According to its online catalogue its list 65,000 items.

Why purge?

[Darinbob]

I don't understand why they would purge books? One of the benefits of a good library is that you can get hard to find books, rarely read books, older stuff that people have forgotten about, and so forth.

Re:Why purge?

[Joe_Dragon]

Why call it an purge as that sounds to much like what nazi Germany did to books they wanted to get rid of.

Re:Why purge?

[Burdell]

Most likely due to limited space. Libraries aren't infinite, so every new book has to displace an old one.

Re:Why purge?

[CRCulver]

Space is limited. Many public libraries are housed in these tiny buildings. Even moving the books to closed stacks would still require maintenance of that storage space, plus paying people to bring up books from the stacks, and that's often beyond the small budgets of public libraries.

But these very frequent purges are typical of only public libraries with a very ordinary public. University libraries often purge their general libraries, but only after 5 or 10 years since an album last circulated. Only in university specialist libraries are items always held onto for the long haul even if no interest has been shown in them for some time.

Re:Why purge?

[Darinbob]

But this process means they keep new mass market fluff, and not old out of print books.

Re:Why purge?

[frank_adrian314159]

Because libraries became places relatively devoid of books in the late 1980's-2000 when their stock of actual reading material was replaced by books on tape, videos, and computer screens. Libraries have been sort of fucked up except for a place to get children's books ever since.

Get with the times - if you actually want to read, you can attempt to download their limited online books onto your e-reader of phone through their lousy e-borrowing software (which requires a special client to read - you wouldn't want to be a pirate, would you?). Or do what I do - avoid the place entirely and order stuff I actually want to read to be downloaded to my Kindle.

Re:Why purge?

[JBMcB]

For some libraries, sure, but my local public library is using, maybe, 60% of their shelf space and they still seem to purge tons of books almost monthly. The exception is kids books, which they seem to hold on to forever.

Around me there is a lot of cheap, empty warehouse space. I think it would be cool for a bunch of library systems to get together and buy one, converting it into a giant set of stacks for "archived" books. Shoot, downtown there is a converted warehouse bookstore that carries more books than any library in the area (and there are some HUGE libraries in the area)

Re:Why purge?

[itsme1234]

I remember for sure once I bought a book and didn't have to throw out anything from my library. And I don't have an infinite one. Probably you're referring to buying infinitely many books this year?

Re: Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're also getting rid of a lot of old fluff too. Go to a library sale sometime, and see a lot of short lived books for sale, not classics being pushed out by new stuff.

Re:Why purge?

[DogDude]

That's sad. I go to the library regularly. I enjoy it. It's one of the unequivocally good things that comes from modern society. It's much better than having to read corporate-approved "books" on a gadget controlled by said corporation.

Re:Why purge?

[jrmcferren]

I know my local library used to sell their old books it isn't like they are tossing them in the dumpster. The money from the sale can also help buy the newer materials that are in demand, be it books, movies (IIRC the local library had and may still have a rental service), or anything else that the public using the library needs.

Re:Why purge?

[Calydor]

Willful ignorance.

Imagine you have a room. The room's walls can't be expanded. Within this room you put more and more and more books. Eventually there will be no room for more books, even though you don't have infinite books yet.

That is pretty much what a library is.

Re:Why purge?

[TheRaven64]

Even if storage is free, there's a cost involved in indexing them prior to long-term storage and in retrieval. Even if that were free, if a book hasn't been requested for two years, there's a very good chance that it will never be requested again. If you sell them off, you can typically buy one new book for every 5-10 that you sell. If there's less than a 10% probability of the book being requested again then it's probably better to sell it now and buy a new copy later if there's a spike in demand.

That said, I do wish libraries would either sell all or none of the books in a series. It's fantastically annoying when they have all except the first one, or books 1, 3, 4 and 5 but not book 2 in a series. And once they've got a hole in the middle, people never make it to the end of the series because they don't want to skip one, so demand goes down for the later ones, so they get rid of those, then eventually get rid of the first one because no one wants to read the first book in a series from a library that doesn't have any of the rest.

Re:Why purge?

[meerling]

Librarians naturally abhor such things, but it is true that the library has limited storage and the managers that make these policies tend not to be librarians, or even give a crap what's important to those below them and thus often make such flaky rulings resulting in the people it affects finding creative ways around them.

Re: Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Library shelves aren't infinite, but you can move books into much more compact storage than shelves. Access time is longer, but better than rebuying

Re:Why purge?

[tsa]

Most books are corporate approved, or they wouldn't be sold. Only very few people sell their books themselves.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why they would purge books? One of the benefits of a good library is that you can get hard to find books, rarely read books, older stuff that people have forgotten about, and so forth.

Wasn't google scanning a ton of books in? I know I've seen search results like that. All books need preserved and digitally does work. Anyone being able to get any book from say the library of congress on a kindle is a thing that we need to encourage.

We need to cut some of the copyright terms and such so out of print books can be archived properly, not lost when some library runs out of space.

Re:Why purge?

[CRCulver]

It's much better than having to read corporate-approved "books" on a gadget controlled by said corporation.

I've owned a Kindle for the last three years and it has changed my life as a reader, but I have never bought a single book from Amazon: I just download whatever I want to read from pirate sites. (Often they are in .epub format, but with Calibre it's trivial to automatically convert the book to Kindle format when copying to the device). And no, Amazon is not "controlling my gadget": the moment I unboxed it, I set it in airplane mode, so it has never even connected to a network.

Re:Why purge?

[Maxo-Texas]

That was the model of libraries when fewer books were published per year.

Now they have to balance demand for new books against availability of older books.

The problem is it creates a cultural amnesia.. a perpetual "now" with less history.

I think scanning and retaining an electronic copy to release when the copyright goes away would be a better approach.

Re:Why purge?

[ColdWetDog]

Interlibrary loan does that sort of thing. If you are looking for an old / obscure book, then more than likely you know what the title is and can search for it. Or the librarian can. Then you can get if from the NY Public Library or some other larger facility. If you are just wandering the shelves looking for some ancient book on Dragons or Runes, the local library is probably not the place for you.

You need to go to Hogwarts.

Re:Why purge?

[tuxgeek]

Not much difference.
It's all about money and bean counters now.
Free access to books and information to the masses is not profitable to some that value money over people.
Not all can afford computers.

Re:Why purge?

[MightyMartian]

The problem is that it's not likely copyright will ever go away. For all intents and purposes copyright is being re-engineered as a perpetual entity, so that Walt Disney can still profit from Steamboat Mickey a million years from now.

Re:Why purge?

[tuxgeek]

In a more civilized time we would just expand the library.
Bonds usually are the means to pay for them. The people you elect are the ones you pay to do this stuff.
This process tends to make for jobs which tends to keep money flowing around an area.
It's a part of capitalism that seems to have been lost.
From a more civilized time.

Re:Why purge?

[SNRatio]

A branch library justifies its expenditure of public funding by being useful to it's community. To a first approximation, If more people check out new mass market fluff than old mass market fluff then recycling older titles is useful. Branch libraries are just that: branches. Almost all have access to state or regional interlibrary loan for rare titles. If the goal is to have older titles onsite so that people browsing will come across them: shuffling the rarer books between branch libraries every so often would be better than trying to have a "complete" collection at each site. Regular users of the library would have new-to-them titles to browse every few months.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a growing suspicion over the last few years that a large number of internet users live in the library.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know my local library used to sell their old books it isn't like they are tossing them in the dumpster. The money from the sale can also help buy the newer materials that are in demand, be it books, movies (IIRC the local library had and may still have a rental service), or anything else that the public using the library needs.

A public library is no place for movie rentals unless the movies are classics but even then I would prefer movies moved to permanently publicly accessible websites such as the Internet Archive. Older books, less popular books might spark the imagination of someone years later.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also called weeding.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if storage is free, there's a cost involved in indexing them prior to long-term storage and in retrieval.

There is a solution to index such massive archives of printed materials. It is called the card catalogue and has worked for centuries. Gopher, as I recall, was a computer interface to the same catalogues. Maybe it is better to use time-tested methods instead of always thinking short-term.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

The policy ensures the library will have the same selection as my local bookstore. I already have access to my local bookstore.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Books are like Github repositories. 99% of them are vanity projects that are no longer interesting to anyone but their author. The high volume of college reimplementation of quicksort makes it an extremely challenging task to find source code worth executing.

Re:Why purge?

[Ferretman]

Libraries purge books on occasion if they aren't being used very much. I personally don't think it's a very good practice myself though those books that are "purged" aren't actually purged as in "burned", nearly always they are sold to the public. I picked some of the more obscure science fiction novels which I'd read in high school which apparently weren't as popular as others; several in fact were hard back first editions which I treasure.

I think they would be better served to warehouse them somewhere and rotate a percentage of their stock every couple of months myself, but that requires warehouses to store them and trucks to transport them and all kinds of other problems that put a kink in my otherwise fine idea. I suspect there will be less and less of this as digital editions become more and more common.

Ferret

Re:Why purge?

[Locke2005]

They make a few bucks selling old books, but you've got to sell a LOT of old books at $0.25 each to buy a single new book! Probably a better strategy would be to put unused books into storage on the off chance that somebody wants them some day, Libraries have an obligation to preserve history, not just to meet the changing demands of current customers!

Re:Why purge?

[Locke2005]

95% of the volume of a library is empty space. Move the shelves closer together!

Re:Why purge?

[pete6677]

Try getting modern taxpayers to support a bond issue to expand the library for the purpose of storing more physical books, at a time when fewer and fewer people are interested in physical books. Try being a politician facing re-election who voted for such bonds. The attack ads would write themselves.

Re:Why purge?

[Darinbob]

The local library is often the only library most people have access to.

Re: Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's a warehouse with books.

Re:Why purge?

[martiniturbide]

There is the problem that old books that can not be sold are being purged (or recycled). I think the best way for the moment is send a copy of each book the Internet Archive Book Drive. They take some time to scan the books, but at least there is a chance for knowledge to be preserved. https://blog.archive.org/2010/...

Re:Why purge?

[Solandri]

The publishing industry needs to be forced to modernize, so we can put ebooks in libraries. Purges due to limited space, copies only being available at other libraries instead of onsite, not having "complete" collections, and lack of funds to maintain books that sit on shelves but are rarely looked at - none of these have been real-world factors since the 1990s. Unless some archaic industry has been deliberately fighting technology which reduces cost and improves ease of distribution.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in a university library for a while. L-Space is, in fact, infinite.

Re:Why purge?

[tepples]

The Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has something similar to this: less frequently accessed books go into more dense storage in the downtown branch's basement, and patrons can request them through the catalog terminal.

Re:Why purge?

[tepples]

Only very few people sell their books themselves.

But then only very few people are professional authors in the first place. Nowadays, with print on demand services and e-books, it's easier than ever to self-publish. In fact, one e-book that I've bought from an individual author is E-Word: Edenics Digital Dictionary by Isaac Mozeson, a list of false cognates between Hebrew and other languages, as a DRM-free PDF.

Re:Why purge?

[tepples]

The interim extensions in the 1960s, the Copyright Act of 1978, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 were all part of the same change: phasing in the "life of grandchildren" standard that the rest of the developed world had been using for decades, including an update to reflect increased overall longevity. The Supreme Court recognized this when it upheld the CTEA in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and the opinion of the Court carefully distinguished this from the possibility of "legislative misbehavior" that public domain advocates would come to call "perpetual copyright on the installment plan". But so far, no major industrialized countries other than Mexico have tried to push anything beyond life of grandchildren. So I don't see a possibility for a drastic shift in the rationale underlying international copyright term standards between now and the end of 2023, when U.S. copyright in the works establishing the characters Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh is set to expire under current law.

Re: Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I question your assertion that it is better than rebuying. If you pay $10/month for a square foot of floor-space of prime urban real estate, and Amazon pays $1/month for a square foot of warehouse space in the middle of a worthless industrial zoning area, it is substantially more efficient to sell all of your old books to Amazon, and then buy them back as needed than it is to hoard them in the middle of some bumfuck town where a population of 1000 is unlikely to ever read more than 1% of them.

I question your understanding of what a library is. Very few, if any, public libraries are in rented space, and I'm pretty sure they don't pay taxes, so where does this crazy $10 per square foot per month figure come from? Also, I'm trying to work out how you think that some small town with a population of 1000 would have any "prime urban real estate"? You realize that's a contradiction in terms, right?

Re:Why purge?

[shanen]

Writing as an aging bibliophile who loves the feel and "process" of reading paper books, I'm still forced to regard this as a kind of Luddite problem. Or maybe I should just describe it as bad economics?

The value of a library's shelf space is measurable. The old books should not be rendered inaccessible, but their marginal value continues to decline and shelf space needs to be made available for the new stuff that people want to read more. The obvious and rational response is to retire old paper books in favor of electronic versions. Personally I hate ebooks and think Amazon is aggressively creating an ebook monopoly that will destroy the publishing industry, but... It would make much more sense to make the old, long-tail books available instantly in electronic forms.

There should actually be an equilibrium price here where the 'rental' cost to the library is balanced against the value of the shelf space. For old fogies like me, they should still have an inter-library loan to (slowly) borrow a paper copy. It's not like the old books are going anywhere, eh?

(As usual, I would have hoped to see previous commenters ahead of me, and as too usual these days, it seems no one goes to the obvious places... I should have searched harder? However, in this case the key terms were obvious and they came up almost entirely dry. The unmoderated comment I'm replying to does mention "ebooks", though the notion of putting "ebooks in libraries" is confusing. This is primarily a problem of permissions exacerbated by the greed and desperation of the publishers. The technology is already there.)

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Look at how new libraries are designed. There is less and less physical space for books. Only a small percentage of the volume is actual book shelves. Instead everything is grandiose architecture, hollow space, high ceilings, vast lounges and multimedia shit, just so that they have an excuse to get rid of books.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been to a library or two in the last 20 years? Most of them have been changing and evolving, at every scale from small town to big city to university libraries. Stack space shrinks, as the library space gets used more and more for electronic access and community services. Smaller libraries are reducing their book storage in order to provide more of what the community is insterested in, like meeting spaces, classes, and access to electronic resources. Larger libraries with archival missions still store books, but make more and more use of closed stacks with faster semi-automatic or fully automatic retrieval systems.

I've even been to middle of nowhere rural libraries, when visiting family, and they have modernized a lot.

Re:Why purge?

[itsme1234]

1. Why would you limit your library to precisely one and the same room if you obviously have the funds to operate it and buy "put more and more and more books" ? Please distinguish between "we need a bigger library" and "we need an infinite library"! There aren't infinitely many books in the world!

2. "Eventually" is very different from "each time you buy a new book". "Eventually" we might have the books printed on demand (if anybody wants to have a dead-tree version) so it won't make sense to keep piles of them in libraries, except as museum pieces.

Re:Why purge?

[SuricouRaven]

Anyone can use a vanity publisher - it's very affordable now that eBooks have cut the distribution cost to almost nothing. They'll publish pretty much anything, no matter how awful.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish - interlibrary loan is rarely used in reality. It completely compromises serendipitous discovery that is the entire point of a library.

It's all reverse justification for the changes they really want to make - getting rid of books, downsizing and casualising staff, converting book space into study space and then eventually eliminating the library altogether.

Another example.. homeless people use the library - so they remove the chairs or make them uncomfortable. Result, less people use the library - that's what we want right?

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't bet my life on them not finding another excuse within 6 years. This is Jack Valenti's organization leading the war effort, after all. BTW, April 26th is worldwide 10th anniversary so you can celebrate him no longer pulling his nonsense.

Re: Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

The local library has interlibrary loan service for free to you use.

Re:Why purge?

[TheRaven64]

And how do you fill in the card catalogue without having to pay someone to update it? If you have a card catalogue, then every book that goes into storage needs a card written about it telling you which box it's in. When you take it out again, someone needs to update the card. If you're packing books into boxes, the time spent updating the cards takes the vast majority of the time (as it does for current inter-library loans: my mother was a librarian and hated this part of the process). In contrast, selling the books just requires piling them up on a table and having someone take money periodically.

Re:Why purge?

[geekmux]

Most likely due to limited space. Libraries aren't infinite, so every new book has to displace an old one.

Meanwhile, at the Library of Congress...

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

A poorly thought our law that created unintended issues

Re: Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

The simplest, hybrid solution is this.
The library loans out kindles (or whatever ereader). Beyond books, offer a dozen or so kindles. The library can load them up with the selected "books" on checkout.

Hell Amazon, nook, etc might even donate the first hundred thousand or so of the ereaders as a marketing and lock-in stunt.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

An unexpected outbreak of honesty from management?

It's a classic case of replacing people with the requisite knowledge to make informed decision with bean counters and mindless beaurocrats who think everything can be reduced to a set of sterile "policies" and similar inanities.

Re:Why purge?

[Oloryn]

so we can put ebooks in libraries

Ebooks are already in libraries. The county library here makes ebooks available via Overdrive. I take out ebooks all the time. And Overdrive appears to be fairly widely used.

Re:Why purge?

[Quirkz]

The value of a library's shelf space is measurable. The old books should not be rendered inaccessible, but their marginal value continues to decline and shelf space needs to be made available for the new stuff that people want to read more. The obvious and rational response is to retire old paper books in favor of electronic versions. Personally I hate ebooks and think Amazon is aggressively creating an ebook monopoly that will destroy the publishing industry, but... It would make much more sense to make the old, long-tail books available instantly in electronic forms.

If copyright wasn't so ridiculously long, "old" books after only a decade or two could end up on public domain sites like Project Gutenberg, to be available to anyone with a computer, which is just about everyone these days. I'd think it would ease a librarian's conscience to know that material was still being provided somewhere, even if it couldn't be at the library.

Re:Why purge?

[Quirkz]

As Tepples notes, it's easier than ever for people to publish their own books. I've done two, myself. The *real* trick is in advertising, or whatever you want to call it to get the book you wrote into the hands of the people who would enjoy it. An improved search/recommendation service might be the most important next step, particularly for niche products. For example, there might be a lot of people out there who would enjoy a humorous fantasy novel that weaves in nods and winks to scores of classic computer RPGs, but how many of those people are out actively looking for that? How will they know that some indie author has just published an enjoyable bit of nostalgia, especially if Amazon thinks it ought to get lumped in with video game guidebooks, rather than original fiction that's got some reference and parody?

I mean, yeah, some self-serving schlub could go on Slashdot and talk up his own product (The Eight-Bit Bard, by Aaron Rath .... don't shoot me!) but that still only catches the rare Slashdot reader digging deep in comments on a minor article, and don't cater at all to a guy sitting bored, who doesn't even know that what he's really in the mood to read is something like 'Ready Player One' except with less overall pop culture and more focus on RPGs, say.

Re:Why purge?

[shanen]

The perversion of copyright is a different problem, but I absolutely agree with your sentiments. However I doubt that Project Gutenberg could be ramped up to the scale I'm thinking of. Nor would it be good for a private company like the google (of increasing EVIL) or the Amazon (of privacy abuse) to have monopolistic control over such a definitive repository of human knowledge, such as it is.

I would prefer that the big repository of ebooks be controlled by the librarians and possibly some academics who are sincerely focused on the preservation of the books for future readers. Maybe a bit for their own sake, too.

Re:Why purge?

[ChrisMaple]

The Americans with Disabilities Act attempts to prohibit shelves so close together that a wheelchair can't fit between them. It only takes a lawyer and one bitter person in a wheelchair to make your plan very costly.

Re:Why purge?

[ChrisMaple]

Close to half the traffic in my local library is movies. It's hard enough to justify spending tax dollars on a library as it is, if the patronage falls dramatically the funding will be at risk.

Re: Why purge?

[ChrisMaple]

where does this crazy $10 per square foot per month figure come from?

Opportunity costs.

Re:Why purge?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is far more likely that the missing book 2 in the scenario was damaged or lost by a patron rather than sold off - not everyone treats books well and while library bindings are more durable than mass market paperback ones, a bad coffee spill or being taken outdoors for an unexpected rain storm can rapidly 'age' the book in terms of wear and tear.

Chuck Finley lives!

[Anonymous Coward]

AKA Sam Axe, AKA Bruce Campbell

Sam Rami would be proud!

The fourth estate..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would a newspaper be snitching on libraries? You're supposed to work WITH them, not against them.

Is this felony hacking?

[Joe_Dragon]

Is this felony hacking? or some other felony do to bad laws?

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[freeze128]

If you're looking for fraud, Florida is a good place to start. They have the highest rate of Medical Fraud, and I wouldn't be surprised if that has flowed over to other industries.

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only water boarding in Guantanamo can determine the full extent of these traitors guilt.

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[I75BJC]

Yes, it is felony hacking according to all I have read and heard about USA Federal Hacking Laws. The prep used the computer system for nefarious purposes. The prep breached the computer system with false data. The prep created a false identity. The prep used the false identity to falsify official records. The prep created false information that affected taxes and the expenditure of tax monies. The prep stole time from the Government. Time that was spent on non-government pursuits and activities. The prep should be sentence to decades of imprisonment as the Federal Laws prescribe! Now, isn't the USA Federal Hacking Law a little (or a lot) silly?

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[I75BJC]

Don't forget about Shelby County in Tennessee. Memphis is in Shelby County but Government reports stop at the county level. Memphis is an incredible fraud for Medicare, Medicaid, Tenncare and Obamacare. Probably outd-frauds Florida all by itself.

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[careysub]

Umm... perp?

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as silly as you trying to be cool and "in the know" about federal laws by referring to the library assistant as a "perp" and managing to misspell it seven times.

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[gweihir]

It must be some felony, after all libraries must be emptied and prisons filled. Now look up which other societies in history had those priorities. Opps, sorry, you cannot, _those_ books have been removed....

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually have some evidence of this, I'm sure Frau Weirich would love to hear from you.

Re:Is this felony hacking?

[omnichad]

No, no...certainly prep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

surprised he could read that much

[Anonymous Coward]

after all those mojitos.

Intra-library loan after purge?

[BoRegardless]

Seems like that is what goes on when a book is needed.
Not every library can keep every book forever in paper copies.

Re:Intra-library loan after purge?

[omnichad]

Intra-library loan

Caller: "The books are coming from inside the library"

An inter-library loan is a lot more useful.

The Holy Book Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

This purge algorithm converges to a single book or set of texts in selected areas.

No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[El Cubano]

I am surprised that nobody has brought it up yet, but Chuck Finley is the alter ego/favorite assumed persona of Sam Axe (played by Bruce Campbell) from Burn Notice. I can't believe that they haven't received props yet for the cool reference. Heck, I am inclined to give them a pass just for the originality of that.

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Give them a pass?" The entire story is a reference to Fahrenheit 451, so another reference to "Burn Notice" is entirely appropriate. What they did is heroic. Libraries removing unread/unpopular books is akin to electing Donald Trump as president.

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[Isarian]

If only I had mod points to give you!

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[hsthompson69]

Yeah, the notable lack of attribution there (or the skipping of middle attribution, since Sam Axe notes Finley as a baseball player), was odd...jarring even more so because it was a Florida library :)

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[sconeu]

Finley played for the Angels from 1986 through 1999.

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[Red_Chaos1]

Glad I'm not the only one who recognized the name, and was then annoyed with the lack of recognition/attribution to the actor/character, show, and locale.

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[Anonymous Coward]

I came to the comments looking for this. Good work.

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[Anonymous Coward]

as some other AC mentioned earlier, Chuck Finley was also a Pitcher for the Angels, Indians, an Cardinals.

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give them the "This is my boomstick!" award.

Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[vannoble]

He was also married to Tawny Kataen until she beat him up with her stiletto heal and was arrested for domestic assault against her husband in 1997. I am sure the guys in the clubhouse had a fun time with that.

Why you should support these actions

[SuperKendall]

Read this horrific story from UC Santa Cruz about 80k books being destroyed or sent elsewhere, it sounds like most from the science library...

What the purge rules overlook, and this article points out is that a lot of reference books are never checked out - they are looked at, something gleaned from the contents, and then put back where they were without a librarian being involved. As a result some books people did use from year to year are purged. And in this story at least you can't even get a list of what they threw out, because it was "lost"...

So do whatever you have to do noble librarians to fight the power and the Purge.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[HornWumpus]

Most libraries don't want you to reshelve books. Too much chance of getting it wrong.

They know which books are looked at, they could easily scan a barcode when reshelving references.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, that is entirely irrelevant and in no way disproves the post to which you are responding.

Unfortunately your way of [not] thinking is apparently shared by library officials.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[HornWumpus]

Being a direct response is not relevant? Fuckoff AC. Libraries know which reference books they are constantly reshelving.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[Calydor]

So any reference books NOT used by people with manners who know how to put a book back where they took it?

I'm sorry that my parents and grandparents raised me to clean up after myself. Or that yours didn't.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[Tablizer]

lot of reference books are never checked out - they are looked at

Seems they need a better tracking system. Whenever a book is put back from browsing, add a mark or tally to a card on the inside cover. Or if they have bar-codes, scan the backs of the entire browse stack before they are put back in order to register browse usage. That would be quicker.

And, the purge formula perhaps should also factor in cost of replacement. If a book is difficult to (later) purchase, then it should get a lower purge score.

Thus, add two factors to the purge computations: browse-rate, and cost of replacement. (This is in additional to check-out rate.)

Of course, better tracking systems are not free; but would be better than relying on human memory, which seems to be what's being described.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[MightyMartian]

In Trumpmerica you won't need science. Science is evil and makes people feel bad.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[phantomfive]

Many times I have checked out a book that has not been checked out for 2-5 years, sometimes longer. However, I appreciate the librarians keeping those books around, because I am definitely wiser because of it.

I understand that you need to do something when you run out of space, but hopefully they would go through and get rid of the less valuable books, rather than a blind '2 year' policy.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[SNRatio]

FTA: Yep.

Like me and many users of libraries, Gildas marks the place from which he takes a book and carefully reshelves it when he is done, saving the library staff reshelving work. The algorithm missed his book and now it is shredded or moldering in a distant storage facility.

Most academic libraries put up pretty explicit notices saying why patrons shouldn't reshelve the books.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[CRCulver]

So any reference books NOT used by people with manners who know how to put a book back where they took it?

Many libraries put up signs directing patrons not to reshelve books themselves, instead designating a space at the end of each row of shelves where books are to be left so that library staff do the reshelving.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[HornWumpus]

You need to talk to some librarians. _They_ don't want you reshelving books.

Have you ever been to an actual library? How about searching for a misshelved book? I've seen them get pissed, in a good sized university library a misshelved book might as well be destroyed.

Re: Why you should support these actions

[Anonymous Coward]

Find even a single example of a library which actually tracks which books they reshelf, just for starters. Then find one which also weughts that in their purge rules.
Until then, go fuck yourself, asshole.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[AthanasiusKircher]

The most horrifying aspect of your linked story:

No chance was given to students or faculty to buy the books. Millions of dollars of public property was destroyed. A long-standing and painstakingly collected archive was removed to solve a temporary space problem.

This sounds like something they wanted to keep quiet because they expected pushback. I've been at many university library booksales over the years where they sell off stuff they want to purge. The library makes a little money, and happy patrons take books home for cheap.

I still recall with fondness the annual booksale at my local public library when I was a kid. Some of it was purged books from the library, and a lot more were just random donations from the town. For most of the sale, prices were low (maybe $1 for a hardback, $.50 for a paperback), but then for the last hour or two on the last day they'd do $1/bag. You could get a large paper grocery bag full of books for a $1. I must have gone there for 6 or 7 years and walked away with multiple bags of books... stuff that was mostly obscure non-fiction that I'd never think of looking for (and which was mostly too obscure for the small local library to stock). Sure, I myself would purge a lot of those books within a year or two of purchase too, but I still own some of those books today... including some that contain info that's still hard to find on the internet.

It's unfathomable that a major university library would simply throw away so many books without even offering them to someone. To me, the only reasonable explanation is that the administrators who made the decision wanted to do it "quietly," because I'm sure the librarians wouldn't just want tens of thousands of books destroyed without at least offering them to faculty or students.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[SuperKendall]

I totally agree; that was the worst part to me also. Thank you for highlighting it.

Where I live the public libraries have book sales all the time, just as you described... I always assumed university libraries would do the same thing. But they operate in a different world...

Re:Why you should support these actions

[drinkypoo]

I've seen them get pissed, in a good sized university library a misshelved book might as well be destroyed.

So when are they going to start slipping RFID tags into all the books (and attaching them to the ends of the rows) so that they can be cataloged by simply walking up and down the stacks? All the books already get stuff stuck into them, and the cost of the tags will be negligible compared to the cost of everything else that happens to them.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[Anonymous Coward]

dunno about manners, but your parents and grandparents raised you to be illiterate. virtually every library I go to tells patrons very clearly not to reshelve books. main reason being: people make mistakes. even if it's obvious that the book goes back in the hole on the shelf, guess what, people make mistakes. maybe they get the wrong book in the hole or they move the hole over by accident.

how do we know that people make mistakes? because the libraries go to great lengths to make sure people don't reshelve their own books:

they pay for the labor of staff to reshelve books
they put up signs everywhere telling patrons not to reshelve their own books
they leave special shelves empty for people to leave books on

in a large library a book is as good as trashed if it's not filed in the right place. even if you get it right 95% of the time that is still way too many fucking books being misshelved.

it's always the morons who are so aggressive about their wrong point of view.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[misexistentialist]

RFID to track information? Anything involving libraries quickly become ludicrous because they have become just another excuse for government jobs

Re:Why you should support these actions

[phantomfive]

So when are they going to start slipping RFID tags into all the books

A lot of libraries have had that for over a decade now.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's cheaper to go digital, get rid of the physical books and move them to robotic storage where they can be requested on demand and slowly weeded until there is nothing left.

At this point, why would you invest in all that infrastructure in something that is so obviously dying?

Re:Why you should support these actions

[Anonymous Coward]

As clarification - RFID is happening. But automated scanning equipment needs specialized shelves.. it's not as easy as waving a hand scanner.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[drinkypoo]

As clarification - RFID is happening. But automated scanning equipment needs specialized shelves.. it's not as easy as waving a hand scanner.

I would imagine you'd have to walk down the rows as many times as there are shelves, but I don't see why you'd need special shelves. Perhaps you could put scanners on each book cart, and scan every time they moved around?

Re:Why you should support these actions

[david_thornley]

One possible reason for weeding science libraries more than others is that science books become obsolete. Take a decent novel from the mid-1800s: it's probably still readable and enjoyable. Take a decent science book from the 1850s: it's probably of historical interest only. Science books become obsolete much faster than other books.

Why not digitize?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not take the books slated to be purged and digitize them before they are disposed of?

Re:Why not digitize?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever scanned an entire book one page at a time into a pdf? I did a 50 page yearbook once, not fun.

Re:Why not digitize?

[CRCulver]

Scanning is fast these days with the scanning function on photocopiers. It's not like in the old days when you had to rely on slow flatbed scanners. I scan several dozen books each year (when I visit other specialist libraries that have resources missing from my own), and a book of some 300 pages can be scanned in greyscale in 600 DPI in less than 20 minutes. Sometimes it can take longer to process the scanned images into a nice PDF suitable for upload to an ebook filesharing community than it actually took to scan the book.

That said, obviously no public library is going to go to all this trouble even if things have got faster. This would rightly be left to publishers or to specialist archival teams working on a grant.

Re:Why not digitize?

[HornWumpus]

Scanning is fast and easy, if you are willing to destroy the book binding so it will autofeed. There exist robotic page turners, but just cutting the book apart and tossing it into the hopper is much more common.

Re:Why not digitize?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a book with hundreds of pages once. Scanned, OCRed. Then my HDD died.

Hard to believe

[g01d4]

he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf

I volunteer at our local library's used bookstore where some of our donations are withdrawals. I guess the obvious question is why would they be repurchased if they weren't circulating in the first place? What's also left out of TFS is that library circulation is often used as a metric for a branch's success, as market share is for internet startups (that don't necessarily generate profit). The excuse looks more like a fig leaf to promote the branch supervisor.

TFS does touch upon a more general discussion about what books the local branch should stock, or whether there even should be local branches in the day of Amazon and Netflix. Gaming circulation certainly doesn't help the cause for keeping local branches.

Finally, low circulation doesn't (or shouldn't) automatically point to withdrawal and books are withdrawn if they become 'damaged'. Typically issues develop with the bindings as book drops literally are, and they ain't a binding them like they used to. One of our group used to repair bindings to keep the books in circulation longer.

change policies

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe change the policies instead of hacking around them

Re: Books are read by decadent liberals

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean transgender Latino albino disabled African Americans?

I sense you have no well-defined sense of morality.

Weeding is a Critical Part of Healthy Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but no. As someone with multiple librarians in the family, I can say you are straight up incorrect.

Weeding is not only normal, it is a very important part of collection management.

Watch this presentation on weeding from the American Library Association, or at least read the slides.

Or if the ALA's word isn't good enough for you, read these comments from a hundred or so working librarians.

Of course librarians will make poor decisions when weeding. Making mistakes comes with the territory of being human. But as a general principle, weeding is critical to maintaining a useful library that serves the needs of an ever-changing community.

Are Mp3s ripped from llibrary's cd's legal to own?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are Mp3s ripped from a local library's cd's legal to own? Posting ac because it might be illegal for me to keep the over 12,000 DRM-less tracks I have in my collection. Never uploaded any online, though I have passed usb drives to friends to copy over.

Re: Books are read by decadent liberals

[MightyMartian]

The poster's lack of a well-defined sense of reality is the greater problem. The only other people I've seen with a bigger persecution complex than your modern day Alt-right type are the "War on Christmas" kooks you find hanging out in Evangelical or Conservative Catholic forums.

solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

they should get a library cat, and name it Chuck Finley. problem solved

Re: solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

Any relation to Nolan Finley?

Remember these are science books

[SuperKendall]

Most libraries don't want you to reshelve books. Too much chance of getting it wrong.

Sure if it's some trash fiction book I could see that being an issue.

But this was in the science library. The hole in the shelf the book came from would still be there later, and the person putting it back would probably correct the numerical order of several books to be more properly sequenced after he or she re-shelved it!

Not to mention the patrons are just trying to help the library staff out, not realizing how many tomes of wisdom they were putting in peril.

What want to know is why on earth ANY library would choose to destroy books without looking at resale value... around here we have library sales all the time, most have a rare books section which charge more, but even the trash books like a Photoshop guide from 2000 is there for sale. Sure, after that point if no-one wants it get rid of it... but this instant "purge" thing smacks of something really underhanded going on.

Re:Remember these are science books

[Anonymous Coward]

Science and technical libraries are actually the one with some of the most draconian rules about not reshelving, with many big signs on every shelf warning you not to reshelve, exactly so they can track usage. Expect staff to call you out on it too, and get a lecture if you say, "But it is easy to just find the hole..."

A better question is why

[melted]

A better question is why do we still have mostly paper based libraries. Some books (a small minority) can't be digitized, sure, keep paper copies for those. But the rest can and should be digitized. You can then dramatically reduce the cost of staff and facilities, and make the service more convenient. What's not to like?

Re: A better question is why

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still a staggering number of Americans that don't have Internet access. Sure you can access the materials from library computers but there's something to be said for taking a book home with you for easy access.

Re:A better question is why

[Anonymous Coward]

I know someone who works as a librarian and I asked her that exact question. Here are the main three reasons:
1) The rights holder doesn't want the book to be digitised, because they fear it will make unauthorised copying easier.
2) More people than you'd think still prefer paper books.
3) For about one in twenty books in her library, the paper (or even vellum) pages themselves have scientific value. You cannot put an e-book in an ultraviolet scanner and see that – hey! – there's another text below the visible text. Or analyse an ink sample and see that it's a particularly rare kind of ink that was produced for just five years. And so forth.

Re:A better question is why

[ShaunC]

What's not to like?

Digital books and e-readers, that's what. I want a book I can hold, feel, smell, turn the pages. A book doesn't need to be charged, it doesn't come encumbered by DRM, there's no glare reflecting back off its pages. And my eyes are compatible with every book, I don't need to worry about what format it's in and whether or not it works with my specific pair of ocular devices.

Re:A better question is why

[drinkypoo]

A book doesn't need to be charged, it doesn't come encumbered by DRM, there's no glare reflecting back off its pages.

But it does take up quite a bit of real estate compared to a digital copy. You can fit the whole library into the space of one small book. It's really pathetic that every book isn't available digitally. What year is it?

Re:Are Mp3s ripped from llibrary's cd's legal to o

[HornWumpus]

Tiny collection, nobody will care.

Chuck Finley

[Anonymous Coward]

Chuck Finley was the name of Sam Axe's (Played by Bruce Campbell) fictional character/alias on Burn Notice, which took place in Miami, FL.

An age-old argument

[mschuyler]

Should public libraries be repositories like museums and "save" old books pretty much no one wants to read? Or should they be modern collections of contemporary material people do want to read? It is a sound management practice for a library to have a policy that books not checked out in one or two years ought to be candidates for replacement. That doesn't mean EVERY book so classified will be purged. Nobody is going to throw away the last copy of "Tom Sawyer." But particularly in a "branch" library which is part of a library SYSTEM that has many branches and very likely a "central" library where "last copies" are stored, it makes infinite sense to keep branch collections fresh.

What we have here is a clear case of insubordination by a Branch Librarian who has decided in his or her infinite wisdom that his or her judgment is superior to the overall library policy. Her excuse is that "other libraries do it, too." without any proof of that. But I can verify that it does happen. I worked in public libraries for forty years (most of it in IT) and I know we FIRED one librarian who had that attitude (for that and a lot more) because her acquisitive OCD tendencies drove everyone else crazy to the point that the branch and staff morale suffered.

Libraries have a hard-enough time staying relevant in a world where people believe Google substitutes for a good research librarian. Even considering the Library is just about the only public place with hundreds of computers for the public to use, free databases that otherwise charge, and even classes for the public to teach them the basics, it's still difficult. Yet around the entire country circulation is at record levels because the general public still sees the library as important to their daily lives and an excellent value for money spent. You don't get there by being a collection of old, musty books no one wants to read.

Re:Are Mp3s ripped from llibrary's cd's legal to o

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you HornWumpus, I've read your posts and respect you. From what I've just gleaned off the internet, it's a kind of grey area. I assume that as long as I don't upload them to some file sharing site, I'm safe.

Re:Are Mp3s ripped from llibrary's cd's legal to o

[HornWumpus]

My collection is 50k folders. Some of the folders are box sets with 6 CDs but most are 1s and 2s.

There is a cash value trigger that can really leave you screwed, but you're right, just pass them around on portable drives and nobody will ever know.

Re: Books are read by decadent liberals

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy above me is a terrorist who hates Christmas. Lock up your goats or he'll try to rape them.

Money

[rsilvergun]

We've been cutting funding to public services for 30 years. It's catching up in more ways than one. If you've been voting for all that "Austerity" this is what that actually means.

This policy is stupid

[gweihir]

It is not the primary task of a library to cater to the current fickle tastes of its patrons. Sure, this can be a secondary consideration, but the primary one is to have a wide selection available for people to discover things in the first place. I don't know how many hours I have spent as a teenager pulling books at random from shelves in a library and finding quite a few of them interesting.

Re: Books are read by decadent liberals

[Anonymous Coward]

The more on the right of the spectrum the more the mindset seems to be to accuse their opponents of their own failings. Once you notice the pattern it becomes obvious that is really a confession of character.

Re:Are Mp3s ripped from llibrary's cd's legal to o

[Anonymous Coward]

So, no black suits knocking at my door then. Thanks again.

Same thing being done at other libraries.

[Chas]

GOOD!

Libraries are supposed to be about KEEPING and CURATING books.

This is why these circulation/purge rules are such idiocy.

Especially with library budgets shrinking year over year...

There's GOT to be a better system than "It hasn't been checked out in a while, sell it or throw it away!".

Re:Same thing being done at other libraries.

[martiniturbide]

I also think that the best way to preserve a book is to also to digitize it. The open library has a great idea for copyrighted books, they scan the books they own, the books is stored in a container and they share it online only one person at the time and can not be copied. If the person don't return the digital book, the system just check it in automatically after some days. Check http://www.openlibrary.org/ and Internet Archive.

Re: Same thing being done at other libraries.

[Anonymous Coward]

Libraries are not museums to hold on to worthless stuff that nobody reads. Most small libraries have limited space and a more and more limited clientele, by stocking stuff people don't read further reduces a library as being obsolete.

Libraries are also expensive, even small libraries as often it's a small community paying for it, and unlike what you obviously think, money doesn't grow on trees. Storing stuff forever is just a way to increase costs to the public with limited to no return.

if libraries want to survive they need to change and mold around their specific community. Having a single copy of grishims latest novel that gets checked out 40-50x a year is far more important than having even a classic that gets checked out once every 3-4 years. Sharing programs help significantly with this, as well as getting rid of stuff that's often no longer used. Saying a library should have things its patrons aren't reading because they should is foolish and arrogant.

The good thing is practically all libraries now dedicate some of their space to computers which is far more important in providing actual reference and science based literature which few libraries outside of research and university libraries can afford to maintain.

Re:Same thing being done at other libraries.

[itsme1234]

You can't just scan books and then distribute them electronically even if you try to make it with DRM and to keep "only one copy out". That is without explicit permission from the copyright owner for each [version, translation of each] book. I mean you can but in any place in the "civilized" country you'll get sued into bankruptcy (with or without the nice boys with guns and handcuffs breaking your door at 3AM first).

The Bigger Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Working for a many libraries for over 20 years, in the last 10 years all the staff and directors of the libraries were panicking because patrons just are not checking out books anymore nor are they using library services. The only part of the library that was fully used and never could keep up with the demands is the free internet access they offer. Unfortunately do to the internet libraries have become obsolete and library staff have seen this over the last 10 years. Their only way to combat this and stay open is to create thousands of fake accounts to show book circulation. This allowed them to show a balance in book circulation or very minimal declines for years. Even using this technique in the last 2 years the library could not make enough fake accounts and have shown a 30% decrease in book circulation. Now they are talking about closing all but a few (1 or 2) libraries in each city. We would have meetings with the library staff and try to steer them in other directions to keep them open but library staff felt that it was much easier to create fake accounts. Maybe hindsight is 20/20.

Re: The Bigger Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Libraries are just like everything else, if they don't stay relevant, it's no different than a company persisting to continue to build buggy whips. Why continue to tax people for things nobody uses?

Many small libraries would probably be better served with forming good partnerships with large libraries for most books that only get checked out a few times every couple of years, clearing 90% of their books and refocusing their efforts onto providing access to the internet as well as a community space that the public used,

bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

can i contribute to their legal defense fund
I live in Newton MA, a wealthy suburb just west of boston
we have a great school system and a formerly great public library - formerly, as they are discarding all sorts of wonderful books
so i say the librarians in florida who did this are heros

Re: bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

They have no defense, they weren't defending some great principle they were wasting tax payer money to make an institution that's already struggling to stay relevant even more obsolete and less likely people will use it, making it far more likely that the library will be hit with even bigger budget cuts in the future.

Re: Books are read by decadent liberals

[Anonymous Coward]

Liberals are much more likely to burn books than conservatives...

I'm a liberal; and frankly, I'd far rather burn a conservative than burn a book!

Personal records

[sir-gold]

I find it interesting that they saved all the customer data showing who has borrowed each book, even after the books had been returned, instead of just saving the anonymous borrowing statistics for each book.

I asked at my local library about this many years ago (I wanted to know how many books I had borrowed over the years), and was told that their system intentionally didn't store historical customer data, out of fear that someone's borrowing record could later be used against them somehow.

Libraries should be tracking books, not customers.

Chuck Finley

[Anonymous Coward]

Bruce Campbell?

...Good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make the physical library about exploration, old works and esoteric texts. Keep it mysterious and spooky.

Save the convenience and populism for the ebooks.

good, good...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, good, now just also add in about 1,500 fake people to check out any of the books that make uptight nazis get more uptight and have the database of checkouts prepped to poisonsalt itself if said uptight nazis start demanding records.

Scan it all

[Razed By TV]

Lets just scan everything and let people borrow e-readers if they want to take something home. (If they don't already have one of their own.)
Scanned copies of reference materials could be maintained as well.
Why wouldn't we want it all in a digital format?

I do appreciate that with reference materials, it would be more convenient to be able to have 5 things opened at once.

Seems like a needless step...

[Timothy2.0]

These individuals have access to what books aren't being checked out. They know the retention/purge policy. Why not just check these books out under their own names and avoid the purge?

Re: Books are read by decadent liberals

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see the comment you're replying to...

The left at work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember stolen TAXES payd for those books, so these fucktarded libtards decided to fake records to preserve their vegan cookbooks and commie-clinton defense books. These people should be in jail, not rewarded with positive coverage on slashdot.

Just Another Consequence of Copyright Law

[Anonymous Coward]

If these works passed into the public domain, then there would be no reason to purchase them again. This is yet another symptom of broken copyright law.

Libraries should combine data to determine the popularity of a work. That data should be used to determine whether something is placed into the public domain. Once in the public domain, the work should be added to a server for everyone to access without restriction.

Not without precedent

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at a large university library where one of the librarians who taught classes would instruct his students to check out books in his subject area. I think they had to check out five a week and turn in the names of the books. He was trying to avoid losing funding for his subject area. It didn't really wok since the library administration knew he was doing this and would just discount all of the circulation statistics for his area.

Patriot Act

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good thing considering that the Patriot Act allows a government to go into library databases to see complete histories of books being checked out without warrant. This is a small thing, any tiny bit that would make this snooping more difficult helps citizens of the country that the government no longer serves but treat as criminals by default.

To the people that claim that privacy is only for those with something to hide, consider that any government really cares is about the potential of power being taken away from them. If they find a certain book being taken out of a library that they feel might have anything to do with terrorism, then your actions would be monitored even more.

Consider taking out a book on the life/history of Hitler. Does that automatically make you part of the KKK even if your intent is to do research?

Donate the extra books to Goodwill

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the Salvation Army. Those that are in salvageable condition will be resold on eBay, Amazon or BN.

Probably nobody cares about "Windows XP for Dummies", but it's nice to keep old books about APL, Forth, and VMS in someone's hands. Maybe the new owners will resell it eventually. And similarly for fiction, history, business, cooking, etc.

Re:Are Mp3s ripped from llibrary's cd's legal to o

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure it's legal, at least in not-US and perhaps even in the US.
Looks the same as recording TV or radio to tape.
Copyright is most concerned with distribution I think. The way the content was distributed to you is 110% legal, and there also weren't any copy protection or encryption so no worry from DMCA or something.

If you actually bought $12,000 in DVD Video and Bluray over the years, ripped them all and kept them on hard drive as well as all the originals with receipts and not give any one bit to any friend : that might technically be illegal? Maybe cracking the 16-bit strong encryption on DVD still is illegal? Although if you don't upload or distribute any of it I fail to see how would anyone care or think to prosecute you.
So paying for the content has little bearing on legality. Buy 40TB of hard drives and four or eight tuners for aerial broadcast TV (DVB-T or ATSC), then record one million dollars worth of movies and serials. Perfectly legal? But share only with close family and friends.

Rage Against The Machine was right

[Anonymous Coward]

"They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em."
Bulls On Parade - Rage Against The Machine

Names, I want names

[eric_harris_76]

Specifically, I want names at the St. Louis County Library. A lot of important books get weeded out to make sure there is room for a buzillion copies of the latest Lee Child novel and Star Wars/Trek movie, and such.

If I had a name or two at the StLCoLib, I could given them recommendations for "keepers".

Yeah, I like Lee Child novels and popular movies, and check them out. But having one less copy of "Night School" and one more copy of a book like one of Heinlein's "juveniles" (especially if there are zero now) is a pretty damn good trade-off, IMO. Better to still have a copy of David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" and one fewer copies of that Karl Marx biography (in the "Juveniles" collection, no less!), because Friedman's ideas are on the way in, and Marx's are on the way out. Neither is moving fast enough, IMO.

And of course, Get off my lawn!

My book, your book

[Anonymous Coward]

"Everything new is crap" attitude, "

Everything new is not crap and everything old is not either.

Of course the in Nazi Germany book burning/discarding was an everyday practice. "Old" books were burned, replaced with "new" ones.

What I am saying is everybody does not have the same taste. You may want to read the "in" books, the "hip" books and I may want to read something classic. Or anything in between. Should a library not be for everybody? Even those who don't think like the others?

A good library

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully at my library when they need to "purge" the older books they just add them to annual book sale which is used to raise funds for the library. That means that the books aren't destroyed and the people who might like them can purchase them to add to their collection. I've added a number of books to my personal collection this way. I've also donated books to the library after reading them so that they can add them to their shelves or sell them to raise money.