I always found it interesting how hacker culture is largely propped up on the protections society has carved out for librarians following world war 2 (where certain sections of society had been identified based on what books they had looked at).
The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and only given protection by western europe after clear and serious abuse.
Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.
I grew up in an extremely repressed and abusive household. I wasn't allowed to watch the majority of television or film, and my room was regularly searched for offending non-Christian records and such.
My aunt was the librarian at my elementary and middle school. I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots.
Out of sympathy, my aunt allowed me to access the "forbidden zone" of adult books of which our school apparently had a large cache, hidden in the back rooms. She didn't tell my guardians, and I can't overstate how important this was for me. I've always deeply admired her work and attitude towards information accessibility, and it left an indelible mark on me.
And this is why things like requiring identification to access the Internet is a bad idea, and the narrative it's wrapped in - "protecting the children" - is really more about keeping children away from differing viewpoints
The next/current phase of the library and librarian is as a community center, and not exactly a center of information. Instead it will be eyed for its physical accommodations for purposes like student meeting rooms, or tutors who rent rooms to sell their services.
Yes - they built a huge new library in the town next over as the old one was overflowing with books and then only moved about 1/5 of the books over when it was completed. They disappeared the entire CS section. But it has about 5 unused meeting rooms, an unused “media maker space” and an enormous light filled open second floor area with two couches.
That’s in a lot of way a reversal. The default state of thing before World War II was very little data collection and even less aggregation.
Everything pretty much started in the 30s with data processing mechanisation and World War II didn’t end with more protection. It ended with states having the tools to collect and feeling ready to use them with things like the generalisation of passports, social security numbers becoming standard.
It has actually pretty much gone down hill from there since. I think people overestimate what’s appropriate to collect and misunderstand how things used to work which is why they tolerate so much monitoring.
Years ago, I pointed this out in a university forum, where a lot of the students didn't know this history of public librarians as intellectual defenders of freedom (e.g., promoting access to information by all, protecting privacy of records against tyranny, resisting censorship and book burnings).
I don't know whether this awareness-raising was net-positive, because it turned out that had painted a target on their backs, for a bad-apple element who was opposed to all those things, in that microcosm.
With that anecdote in mind, at the moment, with all the misaligned craziness going on the last few months especially, and the brazen subverting of various checks&balances against sabotage... I wonder how to balance communicating to the populace what remaining defenses we have against tyranny, balanced against the possibly of adding to an adversary's list of targets to neutralize.
In the specific case of public libraries, techbros have already insinuated themselves, and partially compromised some of the traditional library mission, before the more overt fascists have even started to use their own tools. (Go check your local library Web site or computerized catalog, and there's a good chance you'll find techbro individual-identifying cross-Web tracking added gratuitously, even for the physical copy media. I just did in mine. And the digital-only lending may have to be thrown out entirely.)
But when we happen to realize non-library ways to further good ideals, in a period of being under occupation by comically evil adversaries with near-ubiquitous surveillance (again, thanks in part to techbros), we might have to figure out discreet ways to promote the goodness.
> The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment
Maybe? It is also a fact of reality. You need to look no further than the information in your cells, which has certainly spread extremely freely since the very first spodge of RNA to exist on this planet. The very concept of "locking down information" was something that humans had to invent, with mixed success historically.
The librarians I know are adamant about keeping private the records of what patrons have checked out or searched. I don’t know the history you refer to, where library records were used to identify certain sections of society. Where can I read more about that?
What's an example of librarians banning books? I typically see library books being removed due to regulations passed by federal, state, city councils, school boards, etc. There may be some examples out there of librarians refusing to lend out books, but I think they're pretty rare, and you may be thinking of those other groups.
Every school librarian I ever had fought against the administration constantly about restricting access to "banned books".
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.
I get your meaning but it feels overly reductive. I'd call good faith picking a catalog and not trying to prevent people from finding certain books "curation". I'd call "delete anything that says gay" censorship.
> It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
At least in Germany, virtually all public libraries are interconnected with each other, so if one library doesn't have a particular book, another one which has it can send the book their way. And in the case that there's no library at all holding it in stock in all of Germany (which is damn near impossible), as long as the printers have fulfilled their legal obligation to send at least two copies of the book to the National Library, they'll be the "library of last resort".
I have an MLIS, and worked in libraries for years. It's a common misconception that librarians choose books they think are best, or most morally or intellectually instructive for readers. This never happens, or almost never happens. They buy and lend books that the community has asked to read, or which they believe the community wants to read, based on, e.g. popularity. There's not a council of elders deciding what you're allowed to read.
A fun fact that please excuse me if off-topic: Mao Zedong was a librarian before he started the Bolshevik Revolution in China, and then he changed all of China. So it's often said in China that it's really dangerous to upset a librarian.
My understanding is that Mao was a rural peasant from the distant Countryside who was looked down on and marked by his more (self declared) socialist Coastal betters along China's Coast who were contesting with the kmt and later Japanese invasion. The idea that Mao invented the communist or socialist revolution in China is laughable because that revolution had been ongoing prior to Mao's entrance into it. My understanding is that Mao was the guy that stood up and said look, the peasants in the Hinterlands are an Unstoppable Army that is going to come flooding from distant and Central China on to the coast and push all opposition aside and so Mao was basically saying that that the Communists should be attempting to position themselves as favorably as possible in relation to the rising peasant tide of discontent in China. If anything the concern is that if you say anything that the modern Chinese Communist party does not like or agree with they will disappear you to all the corners of the Earth. It is probably only in Taiwan that you could speak openly and honestly about the nature of modern Chinese history from let's say 1900 to the current day. They probably have a better accounting of what was actually going on, and that will soon be deleted by the now dominant Communist Party of China. You can see how they have treated their assimilation of Hong Kong, and Macau before them to imagine what awaits Taiwan.
Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.
I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what medical book covered the proper stuff.
This reads like the sort of self-congratulatory articles journalists were fond of writing about themselves in the late-2010s, just as public trust in journalism was reaching an all-time low.
I suspect the same thing is happening with librarians as they’ve begun to abandon all pretence of being impartial guardians of information in favor of larping as members of The Resistance. Ironically, the experts never seem to learn that you can only play this game for so long before no one cares what you have to say anymore.
The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for good books. Libraries are getting rid of the classics to make room for new books, the majority of which are not worth the paper they’re printed on. We would do well to heed C.S. Lewis’ call to read more old books for every new book that we read.
I personally think the focus on attention span is a red herring.
Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text
I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.
People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.
It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
I’ve come to the same conclusion after years of feeling like the idiot for not being able to sit through books. If people aren’t making it through your book, they might have a short attention span but your book also might just be bloated, unclear, or uninteresting. It may even not have set expectations well enough. As Brandon Sanderson says, it’s very easy to skip out on the last half of Into The Woods if you don’t know who Stephen Sondheim is as a writer.
Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that people are using.
Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
> The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for old books.
Fixed that to mean what you say.
Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise. They also stock books that people want to read. Which might seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the community to use.
However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that no one reads.
This has been an ongoing discussion within libraries for more than a hundred years not a recent issue. Should libraries be a place with classics to uplift people or popular books that people want to read even if they are low quality?
I respect what libraries do,
yet the past few times I went
to my local library I couldn’t find anything I was looking for—and these were well regarded and well known books. I get that they want to stock things people read, but I am a person who wants older books, and I think part of the library’s responsibility should include such books.
I find that old books can often take away more than they give to me. They often have outdated ideas on women or race and are usually far clumsier with depicting homeless, disabled, or sick people. Engagement with fans of old books often is a set of very sheepish defensiveness when I point these out.
I think this is a somewhat wrong framing, and its also shitty to blame libraries for this shift. Tech companies, for the most part, are responsible for the destruction of attention spans, if that has really happened. And I'd be happy to bet that by whatever criteria you choose to select there are more great books written per year now than in 1240 or whatever time you think they only wrote great shit. Its just that now there is much more to wade through and the media environment is totally different.
At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.
The last two libraries I’ve visited have been taken over by homeless … err, the unhomed. The first one had one dude watching porn and farting an impressive amount. The second one has been taken over because it’s close to a homeless encampment - becoming more of a secondary housing site and less of a library. This is in two separate cities in the PNW.
I can’t even really enter into the debate about librarians since the library experience has been so entirely off putting for me. It’s most certainly not a place I’ll take my kids, even though it consumes a significant percentage of my municipal taxes.
I’m envious of the folks who have a maker space-like experience, that sounds nice!
> it consumes a significant percentage of my municipal taxes.
That's interesting, I assumed it was only a small percentage everywhere. What percentage does it consume? I live in Seattle (King County) and our library system only costs 3.5% of our property taxes.
It's not so much "let go" as mid-century progressive legal reform (the CRA, SCOTUS undermining covenant law, etc.) made it effectively illegal to exclude destructive people from public spaces
Not really, there’s three cities in close proximity, only one has these progressive policies. The other two are fine, it’s only the more liberal one that has these kinds of issues.
It’s a tough problem with no easy answers, but one of their main solutions is to put up solid fencing around the encampment. Just ignoring or pretending it’s not a problem does not make the problem go away.
One of those cities gentrified decades ago. Their problem is now more to do with all of their residents dying off. Also an interesting problem, and a bit of foreshadowing to what much of the western world will have to deal with fairly soon.
I’m a recent resident of this city, so you can’t really blame me for its state. And I’d place the blame mostly on city policy, not people “letting go”.
I've been working in the space the last few years and what I've gathered is Librarians themselves often hate what libraries have become. The ones working in University libraries seem to enjoy their job a lot more than the ones in large cities that act as homeless shelters.
Readit News
The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and only given protection by western europe after clear and serious abuse.
Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.
My aunt was the librarian at my elementary and middle school. I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots.
Out of sympathy, my aunt allowed me to access the "forbidden zone" of adult books of which our school apparently had a large cache, hidden in the back rooms. She didn't tell my guardians, and I can't overstate how important this was for me. I've always deeply admired her work and attitude towards information accessibility, and it left an indelible mark on me.
Overstate?
Dead Comment
They told me that one too.
Librarians and libraries are more like community outreach centers now that you can Google anything.
Many are struggling to help people with media literacy, and I don't know of any that are really doing a great job with that.
Everything pretty much started in the 30s with data processing mechanisation and World War II didn’t end with more protection. It ended with states having the tools to collect and feeling ready to use them with things like the generalisation of passports, social security numbers becoming standard.
It has actually pretty much gone down hill from there since. I think people overestimate what’s appropriate to collect and misunderstand how things used to work which is why they tolerate so much monitoring.
Years ago, I pointed this out in a university forum, where a lot of the students didn't know this history of public librarians as intellectual defenders of freedom (e.g., promoting access to information by all, protecting privacy of records against tyranny, resisting censorship and book burnings).
I don't know whether this awareness-raising was net-positive, because it turned out that had painted a target on their backs, for a bad-apple element who was opposed to all those things, in that microcosm.
With that anecdote in mind, at the moment, with all the misaligned craziness going on the last few months especially, and the brazen subverting of various checks&balances against sabotage... I wonder how to balance communicating to the populace what remaining defenses we have against tyranny, balanced against the possibly of adding to an adversary's list of targets to neutralize.
In the specific case of public libraries, techbros have already insinuated themselves, and partially compromised some of the traditional library mission, before the more overt fascists have even started to use their own tools. (Go check your local library Web site or computerized catalog, and there's a good chance you'll find techbro individual-identifying cross-Web tracking added gratuitously, even for the physical copy media. I just did in mine. And the digital-only lending may have to be thrown out entirely.)
But when we happen to realize non-library ways to further good ideals, in a period of being under occupation by comically evil adversaries with near-ubiquitous surveillance (again, thanks in part to techbros), we might have to figure out discreet ways to promote the goodness.
Maybe? It is also a fact of reality. You need to look no further than the information in your cells, which has certainly spread extremely freely since the very first spodge of RNA to exist on this planet. The very concept of "locking down information" was something that humans had to invent, with mixed success historically.
It seems annoying to search for, so I don’t blame you for not finding anything.
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/statelaws
Dead Comment
We don't live in an age where access to information is limited. Curation (retrieval) is more important than ever.
It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.
At least in Germany, virtually all public libraries are interconnected with each other, so if one library doesn't have a particular book, another one which has it can send the book their way. And in the case that there's no library at all holding it in stock in all of Germany (which is damn near impossible), as long as the printers have fulfilled their legal obligation to send at least two copies of the book to the National Library, they'll be the "library of last resort".
The censor orders seafood, a live show with pyrotechnics, and the dishwasher's birth certificate.
Deleted Comment
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_War
Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.
I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what medical book covered the proper stuff.
I suspect the same thing is happening with librarians as they’ve begun to abandon all pretence of being impartial guardians of information in favor of larping as members of The Resistance. Ironically, the experts never seem to learn that you can only play this game for so long before no one cares what you have to say anymore.
Forced spending on garbage content is not a human right.
I never claimed that it was.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...
It's dispiriting to see librarians distort a normal process (deaccession) to cover up their own book banning.
The article itself contrasts that with school boards directing librarians to remove far more than tha regular weeding.
The boards set policy that the librarians are compelled to follow or risk being fired.
Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
The Swiss family Robinson is an example of this. Times of interesting adventure and then long passages about poetry analysis.
Ironically, reading it feels like you are reading the works of an author with a low attention span.
There's a reason so many of the classics have abridged versions.
I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.
People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.
It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
Try going back in time and explaining to Neil Postman that people today find watching TV to be a chore that needs abbreviation or summarization.
I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
Fixed that to mean what you say.
Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise. They also stock books that people want to read. Which might seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the community to use.
However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that no one reads.
Deleted Comment
At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/book-and-dagger-elyse...
I can’t even really enter into the debate about librarians since the library experience has been so entirely off putting for me. It’s most certainly not a place I’ll take my kids, even though it consumes a significant percentage of my municipal taxes.
I’m envious of the folks who have a maker space-like experience, that sounds nice!
That's interesting, I assumed it was only a small percentage everywhere. What percentage does it consume? I live in Seattle (King County) and our library system only costs 3.5% of our property taxes.
https://kcls.org/library-funding/
like most gentrified places.
It’s a tough problem with no easy answers, but one of their main solutions is to put up solid fencing around the encampment. Just ignoring or pretending it’s not a problem does not make the problem go away.
One of those cities gentrified decades ago. Their problem is now more to do with all of their residents dying off. Also an interesting problem, and a bit of foreshadowing to what much of the western world will have to deal with fairly soon.
I’m a recent resident of this city, so you can’t really blame me for its state. And I’d place the blame mostly on city policy, not people “letting go”.