I have a friend who found a red envelope with some money in it in a book that he'd checked out of the library. He figured it belonged to whoever had checked the book out earlier, so he went into the branch and mentioned it. They said that they could find out the last person to read the book, but no more than that, because by and large, librarians (at least in that system) deliberately avoided keeping long term records of what people are reading, to safeguard privacy rights.
Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. Add in cell phone tracking devices that show where we are, map apps that show where we go at what time and what routes we take, commence sites that show what we buy and consider buying. You know for a while there it was impossible to remove a film from your recently watched list on Netflix? (the tech advice was to just select a bunch of stuff randomly and bury it deep if you didn't want it sitting there for everyone else to see the next day).
Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies (I mean, night and day, they were guardians, tech companies are rapacious violators of this principle).
This is the difference between having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not. The customer/business relationship is a poor substitute for the real thing, even when they try to foster the trappings of false "community."
there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying.
As it should be. There are institutions and cohorts of society trying to control access to information and opinion. This has been going on for quite some time. Noam Chomsky co-wrote a book about it in the 80's.
Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies
A librarian friend of mine noted that libraries had come into the business of de-facto social work.
A sense of civic duty?
These words sounds like they are from another period.
I think this is low in the mindshare of the population of many western countries. As a society we're mostly concerned with personal progress, social influence and monetisation.
Cell phones happened and Facebook happened and everyone was like "Hell yeah this is awesome!". Later on, it became clear that all these companies were offering services were slurping up all kinds of information about us that given the choice we probably would say no to.
But when the cost of gaining back that privacy is giving up all these conveniences we've come to base our lives around, it becomes a pretty tough sacrifice to make.
Company: A community is an asset to a company.
"That's the whole point."
When I lived in a semi-rural area as a teenager the library was one of the few places me and my geeky friends could congregate for hours. They would let us reserve meeting rooms so we could play games together. If that library hadn't been there we would have had no third place.
The public libraries in Seattle are an amazing thing. My wife goes to "kids play time" with our ten month old son at a couple of different libraries every week. And we can also bring him in to the kids play area any time and take the kids area books on the honor system. It's a really great way to interact with other kids until we start using day care or he gets to preschool age. And it gives my wife a chance to meet other parents and get a break.
Are you sure that's true? I mean, my local library (like most, I'm sure) has a fully digital checkout log which keeps a pretty decent amount of state for active records.
A pretty reasonable architecture, given the size (small) of the system, would simply keep this data around for as long as needed. Sure, they might not be particularly diligent about backups and preservation for stale/useless data. And no, they probably aren't exploiting it to sell you ads.
But I'd bet anything that they aren't deliberately purging old data. They probably have it all sitting around somewhere, because frankly that's the obvious implementation choice. Designing systems to affirmatively delete stuff (and not break in crazy ways) is actually fairly hard, and libraries aren't given to elaborate engineering.
I'm willing to bet that the quote you got from the librarian was aspirational: she doesn't keep data, she cares about privacy, and she hopes and expects that the people who wrote the backend do too. My intuition says otherwise.
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-manag...
> For example, if the LMS offers the ability to save the checkout history, this should be an opt-in feature not turned on as a default.
The policy also recommends libraries minimize collection of data in general, use HTTPS whenever possible, and maintain a warrant canary.
See also: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/FAQ
n.b. My company creates and manages library software.
Policies haven't gotten much worse. The ease of data aggregation has simply gotten much better.
So yes, I can imagine when it was normal to be able to know who borrowed a book last.
This was also common in Japan as it's important to the plot of the movie "Whispers of the Heart" (English title)
Which was fascinating: "Wow, no one has checked this out in a decade!"
I think younger people are just in general more relaxed about privacy.
Wasn't that more or less part of the plot of either SE7EN or Along Came a Spider (or maybe some other late-90s procedural thriller)? tl;dr they tracked down the suspect because the NSA or FBI was secretly keeping records of library checkouts.
Library's true customer is the reader and hence everything is designed to suite the reader. For Amazon the true customer (!) is the shareholder whose value needs to be maximised. That is why Amazon has astronomical market value where as libraries mostly depend on charity or taxpayer funding. There is a good reason why Amazon can offer you millions of products but a local library will have only thousands of books. There is a good reason why Netflix can afford to produce so much original content for your tastes but the libraries do not produce anything original. The factors you are citing are correlated.
There is no value judgement here, but I think we need to appreciate the good both kind of organisations are doing to the world and they are not comparable.
Pretty much the tech version of
"I am a W.A.S.P., I pretend everybody that has different economic, social, and cultural differences from me doesn't exist"
Libraries were invented because information was only available on printed (or hand written) books, which were very expensive and scarce resources.
Now information can be available almost literally for free and instantly, to anywhere. If the institutional inertia of libraries didn't exist today, would they really be invented as they are?
The "I'm alright jack" mentality
If all you have is this library and time, you could pick up an instrument, learn how to play it, record a weekly podcast/vlog with your progress, edit the video, upload it to Youtube, and design your own artwork. Don't know how to do one of these things? Go pick up a book on it. You can launch an entire career for almost nothing. I'd like to see Amazon do that.
I bring this specific case because, to me, it's an example of all a public library can be when we consider them a public service rather than a burden.
Libraries and the services they offer can be an instrument for people to bring themselves out of poverty and for people to be able to grow and advance through education.
I personally think of it like this - if I didn't have a job, where would I "go to work every day"? If I didn't have an income, and I couldn't get a job, I could go to a library. And a library could be the key to me finding a job, or work, or making it for myself.
A library is a positive place to go with something to do, when otherwise, maybe I would have nothing, which can help me.
My personal desire is not to disrupt libraries, but instead the opposite - to actually extend what they do until it gives even more people a chance to start their own business, find their own careers, or simply learn and educate themselves for work or pleasure.
Lest we forget, that library science is the foundation of information science!
We are bullish on libraries. However, libraries have to keep updating their services and offer community engagement services.
No kidding. One of the best(worst) ways wars were waged in the past were to burn the libraries. Without knowledge, a civilization quickly suffocates.
I don't think many would argue against, lending knowledge and technology as a way to help poor countries, rather than just giving them raw cash.
Citation needed.
This is probably the best hint that they might not be so useful. The truth is most people never go to libraries.
This is one of the busiest library systems in the country, but shows that, at least within a local region, libraries may be heavily used.
[1] https://kcls.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2018/03/2017-Ye...
The truth is, most people don't go to _any_ single place. A lot of people frequent libraries, but they're probably not in the same socioeconomic place as you. When you wrote that last sentence, did you stop to think that maybe you don't really know what you're talking about?
You know nothing about libraries. Go to one.
Just this week, they bought more property adjacent to the building because the new library is running out of parking.
That's a lot of people not going to a library. :)
Perhaps, but most* people would benefit from doing so.
* >= 50%
Our county library system gets $22 million a year in tax dollars to service 2.4 million visits. Could Amazon meet those needs more cheaply? If so, that is a win.
[1] - https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug... [2] - https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta... [3] - https://www.cihi.ca/en/health-spending [4] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-costs-how-the-us-...
In Alameda county we recently had a vote to raise taxes to fund libraries and it passed overwhelmingly - 76% voted yes. The people here think they're valuable.
And my library system already works with the schools to provide free lunches to any child, anyone under 18, all summer long. So. Have your cheese stick and carrots and eat them too, then read a book :)
Put another way: when's the last time you saw Amazon, or a company like Amazon, do something out of the "goodness of their heart" ?
I question your premise. There are other KPI's in this world besides numerical financial efficiency.
"Could Amazon meet those needs more cheaply? If so, that is a win."
Only if those who currently use the library are able to use Amazon with the same regularity. Is Amazon providing children's summer reading programs? Is Amazon providing an air conditioned space during the summer heat waves and a heated space during winter cold snaps? Is Amazon actually helping you do research?
Amazon couldn't and shouldn't do this type of work.
Amazon only makes as much money as it does because it manages to avoid paying tax while utilizing the infrastructure built and maintained by collecting taxes.
It would still make a lot of money without all of that, though.
Amazon is top of mind when it comes to simplicity when shopping on the internet, period. You can't take that away from them with the torrent of anti-amazon memes you are clearly quoting from.
Our shitty governments have not successfully taxed them, and have been literally giving themselves up to Amazon for the "jobs they create" for the last decade. If you wanted Amazon to turn all of that down so they could make less money you are fucking kidding yourself.
Exactly. They can afford to pay taxes.
> Amazon to turn all of that down so they could make less money you are fucking kidding yourself.
Do you think the government's inabilty to effective claim taxes is in a vacuum and not driven by these large corporations? Amazon is not just innocently taking advantage of these loopholes because they happen to be there. The are actively fighting to keep them open and create more.
I'm encouraged by the stores people have left about the role the library functions in their own community. I bring my kids to the branch libraries in San Francisco regularly, and I'd like to reassure people that they are generally safe and clean places for kids and other members of the community.
However, my response to this article was "Let's just get rid of the things." An unsafe library is a useless one.
While this didn't mean adults couldn't go in these areas, it just wasn't set up in a way any adult would rather spend time in compared to other sections. This sort of a problem can certainly be solved.
Also I'd add on to the fact that the sorts of people who spend their day in a quiet place like a library, even if they are homeless, are almost certainly harmless. The strong economy has lead to an increase of rent seeking behaviors that have put working class people on the street.
As this article states, that arrogance to think that everything should/can be "disrupted". Usually the argument for disruption is always around another version of "making the world a better place", while it is very clear that the main motivation is to make a couple tech CEOs and tech workers even richer.
Personally I’d take the tech douche over the academic or the bureaucrat.
Now, the way a lot of people see it is as a set of elite smug overly-paid tech bros arrogantly trying to change every single unneeded part of life by "disrupting it". Which usually translates into yet another stupid useless app on your smartphone to order pizza.
On the one hand you have MARC21 (originally designed for printing catalog cards), and on the other hand MARC is supposedly being phased in favor of many competing flavors of RDF. The academic library fetishizes standards built on esoteric technology.
There are a lot of fun projects though, and as a programmer I get the feeling that I'm really making an impact. (I'm not on a campus any more, more of an academic library consortium).
I do think (hope) that Open Access initiatives will eventually disrupt the high costs of licensing academic publishing (the academy pays for the research in the first place, and then pays a second time to get access to it again). If research products were open, then there would not be a demand for something like Sci-Hub. Even when you consider ILS and OPAC migration projects, the on-line collections budget dwarfs the technology budget in libraries.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_technical_services
The same skills that can provide software which - if the right people tell the right politicians the right things about it - could save some amount of librarians' labor ... can also provide software that will wow a VC enough to throw enough money to far outweigh the librarians' labor.
On the other hand, if enough people tell enough of the right politicians the right things, then the number of librarians nationwide using the software just might become high enough to swing the comparison the other way.
But until then, nobody in their right mind should be paying a programmer enough to convince them to work for a library (presuming that the programmer is also in their right mind, which is generally required in order for the resulting software to not be dogshit).
I personally I am glad that these neighborhood book warehouses exist, we personally take our kids to checkout books about monthly. But as an adult? Almost all my check outs are via inter library loan, and even then my county’s selection of books as limited. Need a recent copy of a “home construction costs” estimator? Good luck. Looking for an obscure 70s novel your dad told you about? They threw it away in the 80s.
A “national library” inter library loan system would be AMAZING. I know my college had something like that, but a single loan could cost $35-50. If a Seattle company (because, come on, Amazon isn’t Silicon Valley) could create a system that lowers that price to pennies per loan that disruption it would be a positive thing.
And then we’d be even further along path we are on now-that we need libraries, but do libraries need books?
I also appreciate being able to browse the small selection of fiction/non-fiction at our local branch. As with the bookstore, I often pick up things I wouldn't dream of searching for online and would therefore never have found.
I likewise wish my library system had more of a "long tail" stored somewhere.[1] Older books (no matter how popular and well-known they were at one time) are often simply not available.
I had practically written off libraries when I was in my 20s:
* The hours didn't mesh well with my work schedule
* I could afford to buy whatever I was interested in
* They never had the up-to-date programming books I wanted/needed
That has changed completely now that I'm a parent. And yes, I do think libraries need books. Communities need books. This stuff needs to be available, even if just in principle.
I was skeptical but surprised to find that my local library system has one copy each of:
* Introduction to Algorithms
* The Art of Computer Programming (vol 1)
* The Pragmatic Programmer
But the list of computer science classics they don't have is far larger. What they do have are a ton of of titles like _Teach Yourself Visual Basic.NET in 21 Days_ (real) and _Excel 14.2.32.rev13 for Boneheads_ (made up). No doubt it reflects what patrons are requesting...but I would personally wish for a collection that leans a little more heavily on the perennial classics.
They seem to be one of the places where poor people get exposed to things they typically would never be able to use. 3D printers are one example.
One of our students, Mani, couldn't afford a laptop. He would go to the library when it opens to work on a website and hopes that he could one day make ad revenue. He was able to find books, borrow a laptop, and learn by himself. There are many people like him who finds solace in the library because it is one of the few places left that doesn't try to sell you something. At the library, they feel welcome.
In the past 3 months I've seen more diversity than I have ever seen in my career at Silicon Valley. People of all races and all walks of life come to learn and it was an amazing sight watching college students learn and teach alongside with adults making a career switch.
I love the library and what it represents: A non judgemental place that welcomes everybody to come learn. It would break my heart to see it become part of an organization that optimizes for profit margins. Here's the webarchive link to the original Forbes article: https://web.archive.org/web/20180722160053/https://www.forbe...
The op-ed itself is also chillingly corporate-elitist, while simultaneously being childish. Let them eat cake and drink Starbucks.
I think this is hugely important. The library is a third space that doesn't require spending money.
Libraries are one of the few refuges left.
It is still better than the middle-school level writing of the editorial the author is responding to.
As for the points made therein, I'm a bit disgusted. The library was conceived as a place for anyone to go to elevate himself by learning. It is meant for a kind of public education. It is not a homeless shelter. Miss Oliver's claim that the library must exist to shelter the low detracts from it's original purpose, to educate the young and old.
Furthermore, Miss Oliver's argument, that we should keep the libraries for the homeless and the addicts jettisons the role of the library as a community center. How can one be comfortable leaving their children at a library when 75% of the patrons are current/former addicts and or homeless?
I love libraries. I grew up in them. I don't think Amazon should replace them (though I do think Amazon would do well to sponsor them, utilizing their distribution channels, repository of ebooks, and even publishing library editions via their print-on-demand services). However, Miss Olivers essay is more an argument to end libraries rather than to save them.
A lot of homeless people are just having a bit of bad luck and a few steps in the right direction will have them be non-homeless people is short order. If you live paycheck to paycheck and then don't have a paycheck anymore then things go bad real quick.
> How can one be comfortable leaving their children at a library when 75% of the patrons are current/former addicts and or homeless?
The main Phoenix library has a whole floor dedicated to teens and apparently enforce it as I heard some "homeless addicts" talking about getting kicked off the floor really quickly the last time I was there.
It makes a lot more sense now.
I absolutely sympathize, and I think that safety nets are important insofar as we as a society can guarantee them. However, the library is not the place for that. If someone is homeless and wishes to spend their time reading, then so be it. However, most people are homeless due to mental illness, not lack of jobs. And drug addicts have non-negligible increased rates of criminality and impulsive or violent behavior.
Libraries, as halls of learning, and thus for a people centered around learning, a community center, must be safe.
“Forbes advocates spirited dialogue on a range of topics, including those that often take a contrarian view,” a Forbes spokesperson says in a statement. “Libraries play an important role in our society. This article was outside of this contributor’s specific area of expertise, and has since been removed.” [0]
Forbes op-ed's are filled to the brim with people speculating about things that are not their specific area of expertise and yet none of it is removed. I think this article was supposed to be a submarine [1] which went viral in a negative context and so has been quickly swept away.
[0] https://qz.com/1334123/forbes-deleted-an-op-ed-arguing-that-...
It is like asking if cooking for for yourself is so cheap and healthy, why do people eat out so much.
- Setting up and maintaining the kinds of programs people are talking about, be that resume editing or maker spaces, etc.
- The finding and sorting of information. Note that's constantly one of the problems mentioned in the article - it's not just access to the internet, but the ability to use it to find very specific information.
[1]. https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/FBI-checking-out-Ame...
[2]. https://www.thenation.com/article/librarians-versus-nsa/
Patron privacy has always been a bedrock of librarianship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoia_Horn
>Horn was jailed for nearly three weeks for contempt of court after refusing to testify for the prosecution in the 1972 conspiracy trial of the "Harrisburg Seven" anti-war activists.
I also host a software development meetup at our local library, and I'm pretty sure that this is commonplace in the software meetup/user group world.
Even Thomas Sowell, a man that isn't fond of government ventures, frequently talks about how important libraries were to his intellectual development as a child.
i strongly agree with this point. Freedom to educate onselfes without using institutionalised education is also VITAL for a democracy to function properly.
People seem to forget libraries are one of the only places one can gain new knowledge regardless of their economic state or status. (atleast, that is how it works in my country).
The idea of Amazon taking over the library literally has tears in my eyes right now, in the middle of a public room: absolutely not.
I grew up with no resources, uneducated parents, and the library was my refuge and why I made it to a successful position the first time.
Take the Library away and I'm done for, and poor people never have a chance.
> We give them a running start in helping improve their lives.
Oh, you can check out books there, too.
It makes me sad that there are people who want to get rid of these places. And what's worse is that they'd use exactly these reasons to get rid of them--the homeless and the recluses hang out there!
That's it. If Silicon Valley wants to help, they can work on enhancing the technology that allows stuff like that to work. If they want to replace a bedrock of this country's public services with private, for-profit infrastructures, they can go pound sand.
I may have told one of them, in a fairly serious tone, that "Librarians know the deep magics." Because man a good librarian will solve all kinds of problems you didn't even know you had.
...I have a meeting with one on Monday to talk about archiving a government website that went down due to budget cuts, taking one of the most comprehensive collections of clinical guidelines down with it.
And unlike libraries, that would be a benefit almost everyone would actually use.
>But libraries are not just a place to find books — they’re one of the few places that provide a number of free services to the American public.
Tax-payer funded != free.
>Some two-thirds of our regular patrons fall into one of three categories: homeless, struggling with addiction, or recovering from addiction.
Homeless shelter / addict sanctuary != library.
>Libraries are irreplaceable. Either discuss providing more funding for the invaluable work we do, or leave them alone.
I find the author's position a little binary or maybe unimaginative. What might help everyone - including taxpayers - is to re-think the community center model.
If the library building is primarily a convenient refuge for addicts and indigents, then we should optimize for that. Fewer books, more bathrooms.
If we still want to have publicly-accessible book repositories, could we combine them with other forms of community services, such as recreation?
That is the most pedantic, useless point that makes no contribution to the conversation. No direct charge for each patron is the obvious way you are supposed to interpret free.
Later on my little community library had cassette music to rent, so I enjoyed Paul Simon, the Manhattan Transfer and Alan Parsons.
The magazine racks had all the back issues of computer magazines I could never find.
I learned so much I would walk there on weekends and just spend an afternoon. I went back there a couple years ago and the microfiche area was now a bank of PCs and I didn't see the music section, but even though such things change, I'm glad my community library is still around for this generation to use. There's no means of discovery quite like browsing racks and finding some interesting journal or book you never knew existed.
"Libraries are irreplaceable. Either discuss providing more funding for the invaluable work we do, or leave them alone."
The Forbes editorial was spectacularly bizarre. Amazon?
Weird that they're taken it down.
Libraries, as physical places, have a sanctity about them and every discussion on "replacing libraries" have to take this into account, I think. It's the place where many people had their first ad hoc meeting with great writers there and had their real education, a notable example is Bukowski: "John Fante’s minor classic “Ask the Dust”; the book, which Bukowski accidentally discovered in the stacks of the Los Angeles Central Library, made a huge impression on him" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/14/smashed).
This, the random browsing among physical books, is the most important aspect of a library for me, I usually spend 90% of my time in libraries doing precisely that.
After I had my son I also came to appreciate the children's area and the activities there in our local library (e.g. write a letter to our hamster"). The PC help function mentioned in the article also seems to important and popular.
As for being a sanctuary for homeless people or those struggling with addiction: My anecdotal experience has been that such patrons are a usually disruptive (and sometimes frightening) influence in most city libraries. They usually use the space to sleep (snoring is forbidden though!) and for other activities.
It's hard to come up with a better solution, though.
The so-called “Book Towns” of the world are dedicated havens of literature, and the ultimate dream of book lovers everywhere. Book Towns takes readers on a richly illustrated tour of the 40 semi-officially recognized literary towns around the world and outlines the history and development of each community, and offers practical travel advice.
And here's[2] an article (written by the author) about it in The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/apr/26/10-worlds-bes...
[1] https://www.quartoknows.com/books/9780711238930/Book-Towns.h...
Go to your local library today.
This is why we must fight for their survival - if we lose them we won't be getting them back any time soon.
merely cheap. they get used as internet cafes with a bunch of bookshelves gathering dust. getting books is something that has already largely been replaced as the most useful books are the ones they do not have. yes the service is primarily used by poor people. also by me. but i am pretty sure the market can fill the gap of 'internet cafe'. in fact i'd love it if one opened up here again.
i am not sure whether i like subsidizing librarian salaries and especially maintaining a useless librarian education program with my tax pay. I just dont think its justified to send people to school for four years to learn for this.
also their opening times are sub-par because it is the public sector. privatisation would benefit me, as they'd quickly realize internet cafes would need to stay open in the evening. right now they just outcompete private internet cafes. not because they are cheaper, but because they have superior marketing presence, paid for with tax.
i have nothing against librarians. like the author says they are usually nice people who are indeed quite willing to help. i am sure the trade will continue to exist, just like we still have postmen internet cafes would still need attendants to help people use the computers and the printer.
However, it is a community center where the community can get together. That is one of the key charges of a city. Libraries are like parks, while parks let us recreate outdoors, libraries let us recreate intellectually indoors, and athletic centers let us recreate physically indoors.
The austin library has kitchens for cooking classes etc. Conference rooms for community groups, class rooms, etc.
We had a techshop, but they couldnt survive. Techshop is exactly the type of thing a library could provide. Access to machines and education on how to design and build things.
While I voted against the bond that funded the library, I recognize that there is definitely value that the "free market" cant provide.
The same goes for parks, hike/bike trails, nature preserves, museums, pools, athletic centers etc.
Every anti-library piece that comes out generally boils down to "I don't use a library, and have little to no idea what services many of them provide outside of books. Therefor, someone who's better at books could take their place, and the free market is better than the state being in charge of this sort of stuff!" Not everything can, or should, be run like a business.
Libraries, on the surface, are about providing access to knowledge and tools. But by their nature they also provide sanctuary – in a similar way to a church or temple. They're quiet, often beautiful, inviting... Those qualities are why you can't just digitize the experience.
This is a powerful stamenent. Love it!
1. Claim something is not working, by mere claiming it.
2. Raising capital to subsidize the business and force the trafitional competitor out of the game.
3. Get hefty evaluation
4. Once reach the dominant market position, raise the price and profit :)
Seriously, I love libraries. I think we should apply the same idea for gyms.
Sadly it's illegal because it works too well.
