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submitted 5 months ago by CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

I was reading a recent article about the efforts by people not to ban books. While I think the sentiment is good-natured, as a helper at my local library, this is actually very problematic. People donate to us all the time, as is how libraries work. Sometimes the books are unpopular, unproductive, harmful, or just low tier.

I would never apply this logic to human beings, all humans have value if the system knows how to channel them correctly, but books are inanimate objects where their expected purpose is to be read (if you were to say a book is useful on the basis it could be used for something like ripping the pages out for wiping a floor for example, that would make its usefulness as a book cease). Often we are over capacity from the donations, so once a year we have a book sale at the church (libraries and churches getting along? Crazy, right?), but even then, a lot just isn't sold, and we're forced to either give them to another holding place or, in the worst case scenario, cremate or trash them. I am all for free speech, but freedom to produce speech is different from freedom to preserve speech, and I'm sure even the ancient Romans produced a lot of scribbly nonsense.

Suppose you were in my shoes and the library could preserve anything forever but not everything forever. What criteria would you use in order to decide what media (books, movies, games, etc.) gets to stay and what has to go?

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[-] BirdyBoogleBop@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 5 months ago

Keep the most popular at the time. Pulp. The weird fan fic you wrote when you were 14, memes. The things that actual people enjoy, there is a lot that someone 1000 years from now can learn reading your weird embarrasing fan fiction and diary.

The rich and powerful are going to preserve all their crap just fine, the normal everyday doesn't seem to get high priority for preservation.

[-] Catsrules@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 months ago

The rich and powerful are going to preserve all their crap just fine, the normal everyday doesn't seem to get high priority for preservation.

I don't know if that is true when we are talking about hundreds if not thousands of years. Money and power can only go so far after you die.

I think mostly it comes down to if you were important to history or not. Even then it comes down to who it telling the history.

this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
52 points (96.4% liked)

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