Amir E. Aharoni, 14/10/2011 23:01:

1. It's not really news for me: My professors have been talking very

angrily about the secret book destruction operations for years and Asaf Bartov, the founder of BYP [1], who now works for the WMF, have been frequently lecturing about this. But Cracked have put it in a very understandable format.

Well, I think it's worse than what one can understand from that article; but other problems are even worse.

2. Since Cracked is rather popular, this is an opportunity to

publicize Wikisource, one of Wikimedia most wonderful endeavors.

I doubt it.

It is criminally under-publicized now.

Sure.

3. Is there any project, anywhere, to systematically find books that

are going to be irrecoverably destroyed and to digitize them? I'd argue that it's more important to digitize them before the more popular titles, which are less likely to be lost forever. I would also support the WMF investing money in collaborating with libraries doing it. BYP, mentioned above, is doing something like this; it is a bunch of volunteers, working on a shoestring budget in a small country. Is anybody else doing it?

http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/ I don't think anyone else could do it currently: you need to think in the scale of millions books. The good news is that the IA needs only few millions dollars for such a project, perhaps they'll be able to replicate it in Europe. Or, let's hope that some public entity will copy their pragmatic approach. In my university we managed to save some thousands books which should have been destroyed, selling them to students. Perhaps we managed to keep it a zero losses operation, but it still needed some lobbying, a bureaucratic niche (it's not so easy to sell public properties) and most of all a very committed librarian. But, note that nobody will ever take our hundreds (thousands?) of shelf-meters of super-old medicine journals. Perhaps we'll find some millions euros to build a new deposit where they'll be piled up in a huge compactus nobody will ever access, just for the sake of preservation, but it's more likely that they'll just rot where they are without any decision, until we'll be forced to throw them away even according the most generous librarian standards.

Finally, this is just a minor problem, if you think of the hundreds of thousands of uncataloged books piled up in the damp cellars of the Florence National Central Library, going rot for lack of funds... just to mention the biggest Italian example, because it's the same everywhere.

Nemo

geni wrote:

On 14 October 2011 21:10, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-...

To be ha ha only serious for a moment, this touches on why we all bother doing this.

Doubtful. Heck to some extent its probably our fault. Why bother holding books on say warships when Wikipedia already provides an unreasonable amount of information about them. So out go the old warship annuals. Except they don't even bother to remove them from the catalog (me bitter?)

My view is that they should be kept, at least to assist in applying verifiability policies, and if necessary, assessing neutrality. Not every source is online, nor is necessarily going to be, even with increasing digitisation of original sources. Copyright time limits mean that it may be many years before they are eligible for Wikisource, or Commons, and in the meantime, we seem to be limited to online extracts, citations in other works, or the originals. This is particularly true of ephemeral media such as newspapers, although I am aware that the British Library only has issues going back to 1840 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library#Newspapers), but that might be enough for most purposes.

There is relatively little destruction of actual information going on. As well as a lot of the stuff being fiction the non-fiction stuff is mostly one of multiple copies.

I agree, but we have no way of knowing. However, lots of non-fiction is never going to achieve notability, so that may not be a great loss.

The problem is it does cause is that the information is increasingly locked up. Paper archives have for the last decade or so one of the loopholes in payways. With the removal of such archives the paywalls become more controlling.

Similarly, state-controlled/funded archives are vulnerable, in the extreme, to manipulation and/or destruction. And in the UK at least, all significant archives (British Library/local libraries/universities) are pretty dependent on public funding. Without a truly independent, privately funded, more or less complete archive of everything, there is always a risk of attrition for one reason or another.