{"id":2971,"date":"2016-02-19T15:14:42","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T23:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2971"},"modified":"2016-02-19T22:28:40","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T06:28:40","slug":"wed-be-discarding-them-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2971","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We\u2019d be discarding them, anyway\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"th\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Library of Congress announced a few years back that it will now archive the collected works of Twitter, the cell-phone text messaging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, none containing more than 140 characters.<\/p>\n

Federal officials explained the agreement as another step in the tax-funded national library\u2019s embrace of digital media. Twitter, the Silicon Valley start-up, declared it \u201cvery exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAcademic researchers seem pleased as well,\u201d reports Steve Lohr for The New York Times. \u201cFor hundreds of years, they say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Twitter archive will join the ambitious \u201cWeb capture\u201d project at the library, begun a decade ago. That effort \u201chas assembled Web pages, online news articles and documents, typically concerning significant events like presidential elections and the terrorist attacks of 9\/11,\u201d explained Matt Raymond, the library\u2019s director of communications.<\/p>\n

The Web capture project already has stored 167 terabytes of digital material -\u2013 \u201cfar more than the equivalent of the text of the 21 million books in the library\u2019s collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

America\u2019s librarians long ago decided their task should go beyond merely hoarding and preserving \u201cbooks,\u201d of course. Over the decades they expanded their efforts to also acquire and preserve manuscripts, prints, the letters and papers of significant authors, sheet music, posters, etc.<\/p>\n

All very well. But the key word there is \u201calso.\u201d The implication has been that they would collect and preserve all this other stuff in addition<\/em> to books.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not true. There\u2019s always limited space, and limited resources.<\/p>\n

I grew up in the Northeast, where I found university libraries a wonderland of preserved culture and knowledge -\u2013 most in the form of \u201cbooks,\u201d many dating back 80 years and more. When I played hooky from my mandatory government youth propaganda camp (\u201cpublic high school,\u201d to all you government youth wardens and stooges out there), I\u2019d wander the steel staircases of the stacks of the nearby university library for hours, researching any topic that caught my fancy, from the 16th-Century holocaust of the witches to the Russo-Japanese War. (I remember<\/em> that stuff. As to whatever dumbed-down, committee-approved blather my assigned government \u201cteachers\u201d were droning on about, celebrating scoundrels and traitors from Lincoln to Roosevelt? I passed my exams and promptly forgot not only the fictionalized content, but even the names of the courses,<\/em> as I presume we all did.)<\/p>\n

Moving here to the West, where many libraries were founded almost a century later, I was shocked to encounter public libraries with no \u201cstacks,\u201d at all -\u2013 their entire collections, dominated by popular romance fiction and kiddie books, frequently stored on a single floor, in shoulder-high bookcases in an area little larger than a common suburban house.<\/p>\n

In their endless struggle to be seen as \u201chip\u201d and \u201crelevant\u201d by the legislators and taxpaying parents who control their funding, the librarians of both public and academic libraries are moving more and more toward becoming full-service social agencies. Yes, the libraries are often crowded, but with children instructed by working parents to use these buildings as 3-to-5 p.m. day care centers, with people attending film screenings, art exhibits, lunchtime lectures, children\u2019s story hours, or borrowing time on the libraries\u2019 computers or wi-fi connections . . . even borrowing movies on videotape or DVD -\u2013 free of charge, which helped put the fee-charging, tax-paying video stores out of business.<\/p>\n

Books? More and more books -\u2013 especially material more than 30 years old, now perceived as being \u201cout-of-date\u201d not merely in the scientific disciplines, but also in fiction and other areas where pre-1980 authors are presumed to have shown insufficient sensitivity to today\u2019s more Politically Correct standards on race, gender, etc. -\u2013 are sold off in parking lot sales, or simply dumped by the thousands.<\/p>\n

\"350x197\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s not worth sending them back\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a seller of used books, I frequently find myself digging through boxes of older books given away, donated to thrift shops, or sold for small sums at estate sales. Recently, I found myself with some boxes that contained a fair number of books bearing the ownership stamps of a single college library in an adjoining state -\u2013 but no \u201cWithdrawn\u201d stamps.<\/p>\n

These were not thousand-dollar books out of any \u201crare book room\u201d -\u2013 there were no Shakespeare Folios or hand-illuminated medieval breviaries. We\u2019re talking books like a two-volume, 1941 set of the travel journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the famed early-19th-Century British poet, which might sell today (in ex-library condition) for thirty or forty dollars.<\/p>\n

Had these books -\u2013 acquired by that library in the 1940s, and likely out of their hands since the 1970s -\u2013 been sold off in some early library de-acquisition sale? Or had some former student or faculty member simply packed them up and carried them away when they left campus?<\/p>\n

Rather than worrying that I might be \u201cpeddling stolen property,\u201d I picked up the phone and called that college library to ask. A very pleasant librarian told me pretty much what I expected to hear: \u201cThanks for your call, but no, it\u2019s not worth sending them back.\u201d If these hardcover books of modest value had been added to the library\u2019s collection in the 1940s, \u201cWe\u2019d be discarding them now, anyway. We\u2019d be donating them to a thrift shop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh Vin,\u201d I can hear some readers fuming, \u201cthings do<\/em> go out of date, you know. These days, any information they want to keep can be scanned in and stored much more efficiently as electronic files.\u201d<\/p>\n

OK. Books made of dead trees are not the perfect storage medium. They weigh a ton, they take up a lot of room; they can be destroyed by fire, insects, rodents, or floods. And make no mistake, while editors and publishers played some<\/em> winnowing role (not always wisely — look at how many notable authors had to self-publish their first books), the majority of books ever printed aren\u2019t worth saving -\u2013 starting with all those Readers Digest condensed editions.<\/p>\n

Since we can\u2019t afford the expense or space to keep everything shelved away from the elements, someone has to do the triage, to show some discernment. But we\u2019ve generally come to expect dead-tree books which someone<\/em> values to last up to 200 years with only moderate care — maybe another century beyond that if they\u2019re judged worthy of re-binding. At which point someone can always bring out a new, annotated edition, reflecting the benefit of further scholarship. And in the meantime, the book does not change -\u2013 you can always use it to \u201cgo look something up.\u201d <\/p>\n

Easily altered, deleted<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meantime, these new, electronic means of storage have been with us for what, 30 years? Less? I\u2019ve already heard of books, published close to 30 years ago, whose original manuscripts exist only as floppy discs in programs no longer in common use. We have no experience whatsoever with how these methods of electronic storage will survive future wars, when bursts of Electro-Magnetic radiation may be deployed to try and shut down an enemy\u2019s computer-controlled armaments.<\/p>\n

I distinctly recall being updated on a new computer memory system being installed at the newspaper where I worked. I asked how I could go in and delete stuff that was no longer needed, lest the memory banks get clogged. The young technicians literally laughed. \u201cThe memory capacity of this new system is effectively INFINITE!\u201d they assured me. Do you know how long it was before their successors came around, pleading with us to purge unnecessary files so the overloaded system wouldn\u2019t keep bogging down, slowing down, and periodically crashing? Less than two years.<\/p>\n

Besides, once it\u2019s held only in the form of digitized electronic impulses, the knowledge and culture of centuries can be easily altered, selectively edited, changed and rewritten, by chipper, well-meaning folks who would congratulate themselves that they were merely \u201ccleaning things up\u201d and \u201crendering them less offensive and contradictory\u201d by \u201cremoving hateful misinformation such as writings that argued there\u2019s no man-made global warming, or that vaccinations can do more harm than good, or that women played little role in the American Revolution, writings that spread discontent by encouraging disrespect for our leaders and their policies,\u201d or what have you. And how would future generations know the difference?<\/p>\n

If it hasn’t happened yet, readers will soon encounter “digital editions” of “Huckleberry Finn” without a hint of the word “nigger.”<\/p>\n

Of course much that has been written is wrong.<\/em> The question is whether our progeny would really be better off, deprived of the knowledge that there had even been debates<\/em> about such questions, debates which might someday be re-opened in light of new evidence, or that might at least teach us how long it can take to disprove and abandon a long-accepted error.<\/p>\n

The \u201chistorical record has tended to be somewhat elitist,\u201d because \u201cIn books, magazines and newspapers it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently\u201d? But to be immersed in all<\/em> available information is to have no useful information at all! You\u2019d be smothered in minutiae! This is the truism that gave us the amusing plaque for the front of the house reading \u201cOn this spot on July 17, 1775, absolutely nothing of any importance happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course we always have a right to ask who\u2019s doing the \u201cscreening,\u201d and to demand access to alternative reports and views. But the first job of the honorable and diligent reporter or historian (there are a few left) is to sift a smaller, selected mountain of data and take a first stab at telling you what was important<\/em> about yesterday\u2019s Legislative floor debate. If one of the senators pulled a pistol and killed his opponent, should that single \u201celitist\u201d detail be buried in a word-by-word recitation of the droning floor debate on some obscure enactment that took up the previous several hours — or, heck, the misspelled tweets being sent by some teen-age girl across the street — so that 99 percent of readers or listeners or viewers \u201cswitch the channel\u201d before getting to a few \u201celitist\u201d details that they might like to — and really ought to — know?<\/p>\n

While the NSA or DARPA may well be blowing billions of our tax dollars developing screening software to search all that data for occurrences of the phrases \u201cpoison the reservoir\u201d or \u201cassassinate the president\u201d (but not in Arabic, of course -\u2013 that would be \u201cdiscriminatory\u201d), I submit that a stored 167-terabyte database of all the Tweets ever sent is, for all practical purposes, worthless. Meantime, it\u2019s taking staff time and storage capacity that -\u2013 in nearly every case, as a practical matter — can only be provided by dumping something \u201cold.\u201d<\/p>\n

More to the point, the folks in charge of our tax-funded public libraries — including most academic libraries, now heavily tax-subsidized through tuition loans and guarantees and thus susceptible to political pressures -\u2013 have been so seduced by this dangerous nonsense that (with the exception of a few iconic titles shown off for institutional prestige -\u2013 think \u201cShakespeare Folios\u201d) they can no longer be relied upon to preserve, unaltered, America\u2019s \u201cbooks.\u201d<\/p>\n

This role now falls -\u2013 as it has at various times in the past -\u2013 to the private dealer and collector. So please, don\u2019t donate grandpa\u2019s carefully gathered and preserved library to some \u201cbig, public-spirited institution\u201d for \u201csafe-keeping\u201d without inquiring very carefully about its likely long-term fate \u2013- and whether there might not be a \u201cgreedy, selfish\u201d private collector who would be more likely to hold it in trust for his or her progeny -\u2013 and thus for ours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Library of Congress announced a few years back that it will now archive the collected works of Twitter, the cell-phone text messaging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, none containing more than 140 characters. Federal officials explained the agreement as another step in the tax-funded national library\u2019s embrace […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53,14,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-education","category-literacy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-LV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2971"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2978,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2971\/revisions\/2978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}