3 ms·

Says who? It could cross-reference a list of important cultural works and make them exempt, for example. That list can be compiled by a committee instead of a l

• anigbrowl 10y ago
  But the whole point of librarians is to allow that to happen, rather than thinking there's one perfect list of books that everyone should just copy from. For sure you would see lots of bias - which you could then measure and challenge, but which could also turn out to be valuable. It's odd to me that you can't see the inherent bias in saying that popularity is a proxy for literary value and designing your algorithm around that. Sure, it'll give you an unbiased insight into what's popular, but that assumes that libraries are in the business of catering to the popular taste, when we have a bustling private sector to do that for us already, which takes account of the fact that a great deal of the publishing industry's output is disposable and of only short-term interest. I mean, McDonalds is arguably the world's most popular restaurant chain, but that doesn't mean their food has significant gastronomic value, does it? What is in the public interest, and what the public is currently interested in, are two wholly different things.
• cestith 10y ago
  Explicitly favoring recent checkout counts over the other criteria is a bias. This is almost a tautology. Choosing based on criteria you favor rather than equally valid or possibly more valid criteria others favor is a bias. It does not matter if you encode that bias verbally, in print, or in software. A bias is a bias is a bias.