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- Hacker News
- As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child.
OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same".
Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...
by jjkaczor - I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them.
My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.
by andrewla - I was a real university librarian for a decade. Most of the books they throw away are truly garbage. Yes some libraries take it too far with "weeding" too much, but it is necessary:
1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said purpose might not be secured) 2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff much harder 3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing
Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.
by jswelker - Sensationalism. That's routine collection management.
Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
by ciscoriordan - > the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books
Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.
by kristjansson - I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing.
Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.
But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.
I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.
by SMV279438 - At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that
by gammalost - My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place.
I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.
by bastawhiz