Posted by mooreds 6 hours ago
But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
> but there also should be accountability and transparency.
There is. 'Books on the shelf' is a gold standard of transparency. They are showing their work in the fullest possible measure.
In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith. The appropriate accountability for that is letting them do their jobs.
Peel District restricts books to materials post-2008 and deemed antiracist, which is an incredibly narrow slice of the historical body of human literature: https://www.peelschools.org/documents/a7b1e253-1409-475d-bba... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/teacher-librarians-sp...
On the opposite end of the western culture war, we have the elimination of the corpus of queer texts at a Florida college: https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/education/2024/08/1...
Either way, it's a position, institutional or otherwise, of restricting knowledge that is inherently subject to the political pendulum swings.
>In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
Librarians apparently are the factions that do that. What books or why varies, but the "weeding" is the euphemism of the day to restrict with.
>In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith.
I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification than a useful model for a political process.
>>In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith.
>I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification than a useful model for a political process.
I assert that librarians fall toward the end of the scale we use to example good faith actors. Someone has to be there.
A thousand times this. People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.
Librarians take their responsibility to their community seriously. This responsibility, to them, is nothing less than presenting their patrons with all of the information (books and beyond) that they are trying to access, regardless of their personal feelings about said information.
Absolutely. My farthest r-wing years overlapped with my heaviest library patronage. Libraries were a space where my overactive, fault-finding radar was quiet.
Seriously. Librarians have always been there for everyone.
Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.
Titles are removed when the card catalogue shows they aren't being checked out. Those titles can be bought by the public at a steep discount.
What is included are titles that are likely to be checked out, plus what individual patrons ask for.
I've done the latter. For some unusual titles I had to supply the ISBN. If they were in print, they were on the shelf within a month.
Excluding books is a recent phenomenon driven by book-banning agendas.
> Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.
This seems to flow from wholly imagined concerns - ones that are trivially debunked.
What is removed can be seen for sale and is also recorded in the card catalog. What is excluded (when book-banning efforts are successful) is also recorded.
What is requested by patrons is stocked. Again, I've done it.
Sure you could argue that with limited shelf space, a librarian is a censor by choosing what they do and do not carry, but then you have to ignore a lot about what censors and librarians actually do.
When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000. (Of course, we all know the Amazon prices are basically made up - offering books for sale that aren't in stock, and on the chance they get an order at an outrageous price, go try and find it cheap on the secondary market.)
Nonetheless, they're always asking for money - whether applying for grants, putting property tax levies on the ballot, attempting to raise sales taxes, despite the ever-decreasing levels of service, alongside requisite threats "If we don't pass this item, the library will close!!!"
I view librarians as ones that completely missed the boat when it comes to their traditional domain of organising indexes to literature, which has been eclipsed first by Google, and now by AI in general.
That's extremely odd. My experience is that libraries will sometimes exclude their particularly rare books from the interlibrary loan system (or from lending more generally), for the obvious reasons, but I wouldn't have thought the library you're trying to use to place the request would have anything to say about it at all.
And actually, there are a number of academic books I've had to request through ILL because they're only in a handful of libraries, the initial print run from the academic press was probably 500 at most, and replacing one would probably cost $1,000, simply because there's only one person in the world currently with a copy to sell (if you're lucky), and they can basically set their price.
So, if it is an AI that wrote it, maybe it has movie script training. That would be a smart move. Movies themselves draw specific personas to the foreground of a human mind and could put them in specific moods.
Or is it a human who wrote it? Maybe it was an angel.
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Ok, no movie business. Is there a difference between biblioteconomist and librarian? I think one is more akin to that notion of classifying without curating or censoring that so many here aluded to.
In practice, I wouldn't know! (fun oversharing fact: I actually considered biblioteconomy as a degree).
I think the post is good and kind for a general audience. It's a good message that I truly believe in.
But I believe it could be harmful for those diagnosed with conditions such as Havana Syndrome, Schizophrenia and similar disorders. That is due to the fun ambiguous tone of "dangerous", which could have unexpected effects in someone going through a psychotic episode (I had one once, not a pleasant experience). There must be a better, less snarkier way of promoting literacy without creating those potential side effects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737275
While librarians can be "dangerous", libraries can be extremely beautiful (or vice versa, who knows...?). When traveling, I often try to visit ones, and, of course, we have some iconic photographs of them too.
I am sooo grateful my local University library is open for public visitors. I visit every weekend and enjoy fast internet, a pleasant and quiet environment and can plug my laptop into one of many large desktop monitors here.