8 ms·

I'm largely in agreement with this Vox piece, but I think there's much more to say in defense of libraries as well. I have a friend who found a red envelope wi

by geebee 8y ago

I'm largely in agreement with this Vox piece, but I think there's much more to say in defense of libraries as well. I have a friend who found a red envelope with some money in it in a book that he'd checked out of the library. He figured it belonged to whoever had checked the book out earlier, so he went into the branch and mentioned it. They said that they could find out the last person to read the book, but no more than that, because by and large, librarians (at least in that system) deliberately avoided keeping long term records of what people are reading, to safeguard privacy rights. Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. Add in cell phone tracking devices that show where we are, map apps that show where we go at what time and what routes we take, commence sites that show what we buy and consider buying. You know for a while there it was impossible to remove a film from your recently watched list on Netflix? (the tech advice was to just select a bunch of stuff randomly and bury it deep if you didn't want it sitting there for everyone else to see the next day). Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies (I mean, night and day, they were guardians, tech companies are rapacious violators of this principle).

romaniv 8y ago
This is a very important point. Libraries do more than just lend books. They are institutions that preserve and promote knowledge and have certain values "built in". They also often serve as local community centers of sorts. Having cheap books available in Kindle store does not fully replace functionality of a library.
- cdubzzz 8y ago
  > They also often serve as local community centers of sorts. The public libraries in Seattle are an amazing thing. My wife goes to "kids play time" with our ten month old son at a couple of different libraries every week. And we can also bring him in to the kids play area any time and take the kids area books on the honor system. It's a really great way to interact with other kids until we start using day care or he gets to preschool age. And it gives my wife a chance to meet other parents and get a break.
  - nojvek 8y ago
    I used to go to Bellevue Library every single weekend because my wife used to work around there. Just being able to randomly fall upon an old book was great. The atmosphere, a sense of community, a nice park besides. A library is a lot more than a collection of books. I'm so damn glad King county does a good job maintaining the community libraries.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    The Capitol Hill branch of Seattle Public Libraries was the first Library I had been to in probably 20 years and I fell in love with the entire system. It made me read much more than I was in the past and the free events and learning they have are amazing. It is an enormous benefit to the citizens of the city, as well as the low income/poor who can charge their cell phones or use the internet so they can keep up with potential employers who may call them or send them emails, as well as look for jobs or complete online applications (as well as many more things). They also provide a free subscription to Lynda with your library card.
    - cdubzzz 8y ago
      Cool! Didn't know about Lynda. You can also get free tickets to a lot of local museums: https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/arts-and-culture/museum-pass https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/arts-and-culture/m...
      - prolikewh0a 8y ago
        If you haven't checked out the Living Computer Museum down in SoDo, it's an absolute MUST. SPL provides free tickets to it :)
- rexpop 8y ago
  They serve as community centers 100%. Storytelling nights, after-school clubs, classes, dances, voter registration and voting booths... I am sure I am only grazing the surface of how libraries operate as community centers.
- sbtrct 8y ago
  Agreed - besides obviously checking out books, my kids (8 & 10) do a range of activities (all free to attend) at our local library - they’ve done a creative writing workshop, a science workshop, an arts & crafts session, attended a biodiversity talk and will shortly do a couple of sessions to make a stop motion animation - and that’s just in the past two months. They also often see class mates there, which adds to the social aspect of development outside of a school context.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  A newspaper interviewed a local librarian. The interviewer pointed out a lot of people use the free wifi from the parking lot after hours, and asked if that was a problem. "That's the whole point."
  - spicytunacone 8y ago
    I've conducted many interviews from such parking lots. I would completely use the library more if they didn't block non-443 ports (though it's understandable that they do).
- sedachv 8y ago
  Not to mention that libraries have curated collections, which unlike the Kindle store are not filled with bot-generated scammer garbage: http://davidgaughran.com/2017/06/03/amazon-has-a-fake-book-problem/ http://davidgaughran.com/2017/06/03/amazon-has-a-fake-book-p...
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Yeah, the guy who wrote the original article(that this piece responds to) had obviously never set foot in a library, because he still thinks of them as repositories of books. That's a function but it's not the main function. When I lived in a semi-rural area as a teenager the library was one of the few places me and my geeky friends could congregate for hours. They would let us reserve meeting rooms so we could play games together. If that library hadn't been there we would have had no third place.
keb_ 8y ago
Libraries are public institutions funded by tax payers and mainly employ civil servants and government employees. It would be terribly ironic if a public institution did not abide by the law or respect your rights. Not to mention they do not exist for profit.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  > It would be terribly ironic if a public institution did not abide by the law or respect your rights. LOL. Have you been to America?
  - dang 8y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
ajross 8y ago
> librarians (at least in that system) deliberately avoided keeping long term records of what people are reading, to safeguard privacy rights. Are you sure that's true? I mean, my local library (like most, I'm sure) has a fully digital checkout log which keeps a pretty decent amount of state for active records. A pretty reasonable architecture, given the size (small) of the system, would simply keep this data around for as long as needed. Sure, they might not be particularly diligent about backups and preservation for stale/useless data. And no, they probably aren't exploiting it to sell you ads. But I'd bet anything that they aren't deliberately purging old data. They probably have it all sitting around somewhere, because frankly that's the obvious implementation choice. Designing systems to affirmatively delete stuff (and not break in crazy ways) is actually fairly hard, and libraries aren't given to elaborate engineering. I'm willing to bet that the quote you got from the librarian was aspirational: she doesn't keep data, she cares about privacy, and she hopes and expects that the people who wrote the backend do too. My intuition says otherwise.
- nandhp 8y ago
  The American Library Association specifically discourages the behavior of your local library: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-management-systems http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-manag... > For example, if the LMS offers the ability to save the checkout history, this should be an opt-in feature not turned on as a default. The policy also recommends libraries minimize collection of data in general, use HTTPS whenever possible, and maintain a warrant canary. See also: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/FAQ http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/FAQ
- jedberg 8y ago
  I just checked my own library login, and it looks like they keep 18 months of checkout history and then purge it (or at least it is no longer available to me after that point, which means it is no longer available to the librarian because we share the same interface).
- samsa 8y ago
  Checkout records are going to vary from library to library depending on which software package they are using as their ILS (“integrated library system”) and how that software package is configured. My library for example (the one I work at, not my home library) has no way of knowing the checkout history of any given item except for 1) who has that item out now, if it is checked out and 2) who had it out last. In our case the database is hosted remotely by our software vendor, so we really couldn’t get at checkout data other than those two points above as that is all that displays in the staff side client, and we don’t have any servers with patron data onsite.
chrisseaton 8y ago
> Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. I think younger people are just in general more relaxed about privacy.
stcredzero 8y ago
Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? This is the difference between having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not. The customer/business relationship is a poor substitute for the real thing, even when they try to foster the trappings of false "community." there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. As it should be. There are institutions and cohorts of society trying to control access to information and opinion. This has been going on for quite some time. Noam Chomsky co-wrote a book about it in the 80's. Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies A librarian friend of mine noted that libraries had come into the business of de-facto social work.
- dm319 8y ago
  > having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not A sense of civic duty? These words sounds like they are from another period. I think this is low in the mindshare of the population of many western countries. As a society we're mostly concerned with personal progress, social influence and monetisation.
  - metanoia 8y ago
    And this is the essential problem with society today - the lack of acknowledgement that there is such a thing as civic duty, or the greater good. It's all about personal advancement regardless of the externalized costs. In the words of Toby Keith - It's all about me, it's all about I, it's all about #1...
    - woah 8y ago
      Also, the kids these days wear funny clothes, their music is too loud, and they have no manners. We’re really going to hell in a handbasket. Also the JavaScript frameworks have too many plugins.
zouhair 8y ago
Oh well, we live in a world where people willingly and happily give all their privacy to a private entity just for the privilege to take a cab. So the future is grim.
- moate 8y ago
  Never mind that there's an app that combines social media and...a payment service.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    I would say using Venmo is different but the idea that a social network could be built around a p2p payment service works surprisingly better than it has any right to. https://soundcloud.com/replyall/4-follow-the-money https://soundcloud.com/replyall/4-follow-the-money
    - moate 8y ago
      It's the idea that P2P payments are PUBLIC BY DEFAULT on "social media" platform and what that says about people's idea of what privacy is.
      - Spivak 8y ago
        I don't disagree but at the same time it's one setting away to make them all private forever. It could be much worse.
ensignavenger 8y ago
It wasn't that long ago that every library book had a card, and when you checked something out, your name, or a stamp/imprint of your library card number was placed on that card, when you checked the book back in, the card would be removed from a file, placed back in the book, and the book re-shelved- making it trivial to match to the person... now, you would have to look in each book and see who had checked it out, but still not very private.
Karishma1234 8y ago
While I appreciate your idea, I think you should also see the other benefits people have from Netflix/Amazon like model. Library's true customer is the reader and hence everything is designed to suite the reader. For Amazon the true customer (!) is the shareholder whose value needs to be maximised. That is why Amazon has astronomical market value where as libraries mostly depend on charity or taxpayer funding. There is a good reason why Amazon can offer you millions of products but a local library will have only thousands of books. There is a good reason why Netflix can afford to produce so much original content for your tastes but the libraries do not produce anything original. The factors you are citing are correlated. There is no value judgement here, but I think we need to appreciate the good both kind of organisations are doing to the world and they are not comparable.
zjaffee 8y ago
The more time goes on, the more I think we need to nationalize libraries beyond just the ones already owned by the federal government. In the digital age, the framework that is a local library makes less sense than there being a place to pull audiobooks/ebooks from an organization funded through the national endowment for the humanities.
tooltalk 8y ago
This is probably not true at most libraries. I used to work at one of the largest library systems in the country and they had patrons' checkout logs for at least a full-decade (in a poorly designed, insecure database system, now outsourced to a managed provider at a great cost $1M+ per year). I also don't believe they had patrons' privacy or data security as their priority -- most libraries simply never had the kind of technical competence to protect such data.
SmellTheGlove 8y ago
Total agreement. Libraries are a public good. Any disruption is going to be at least partial privatization. If it's going to remain free for the end user and not funded from public dollars, the public just became the product (to harp on that meme).
greggman 8y ago
I haven't been to a library in 30 years or so but it used to be that the list of people who borrowed the book were written in a piece of paper in the book itself. So yes, I can imagine when it was normal to be able to know who borrowed a book last. This was also common in Japan as it's important to the plot of the movie "Whispers of the Heart" (English title)
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  In my city, the libraries post signs that, immediately after you return a book and pay any late fees, they destroy all records that you ever checked any books out.
- mcguire 8y ago
  I think it's been longer that 30 years; the only thing I remember on the check-out slip was the due date. Which was fascinating: "Wow, no one has checked this out in a decade!"
jayd16 8y ago
This is just nostalgia at play. When you borrow a book your name goes on the slip with a timestamp. The slip is reused until its full and then its thrown away. If the slip never got full it would most likely never be replaced. Anyone who checked out the book could read the slip. Policies haven't gotten much worse. The ease of data aggregation has simply gotten much better.
jgh 8y ago
> Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. Wasn't that more or less part of the plot of either SE7EN or Along Came a Spider (or maybe some other late-90s procedural thriller)? tl;dr they tracked down the suspect because the NSA or FBI was secretly keeping records of library checkouts.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  It was Se7en and I guess also Conspiracy Theory.

by geebee 8y ago

romaniv 8y ago

This is a very important point. Libraries do more than just lend books. They are institutions that preserve and promote knowledge and have certain values "built in". They also often serve as local community centers of sorts. Having cheap books available in Kindle store does not fully replace functionality of a library.

cdubzzz 8y ago
> They also often serve as local community centers of sorts. The public libraries in Seattle are an amazing thing. My wife goes to "kids play time" with our ten month old son at a couple of different libraries every week. And we can also bring him in to the kids play area any time and take the kids area books on the honor system. It's a really great way to interact with other kids until we start using day care or he gets to preschool age. And it gives my wife a chance to meet other parents and get a break.
- nojvek 8y ago
  I used to go to Bellevue Library every single weekend because my wife used to work around there. Just being able to randomly fall upon an old book was great. The atmosphere, a sense of community, a nice park besides. A library is a lot more than a collection of books. I'm so damn glad King county does a good job maintaining the community libraries.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  The Capitol Hill branch of Seattle Public Libraries was the first Library I had been to in probably 20 years and I fell in love with the entire system. It made me read much more than I was in the past and the free events and learning they have are amazing. It is an enormous benefit to the citizens of the city, as well as the low income/poor who can charge their cell phones or use the internet so they can keep up with potential employers who may call them or send them emails, as well as look for jobs or complete online applications (as well as many more things). They also provide a free subscription to Lynda with your library card.
  - cdubzzz 8y ago
    Cool! Didn't know about Lynda. You can also get free tickets to a lot of local museums: https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/arts-and-culture/museum-pass https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/arts-and-culture/m...
    - prolikewh0a 8y ago
      If you haven't checked out the Living Computer Museum down in SoDo, it's an absolute MUST. SPL provides free tickets to it :)
rexpop 8y ago
They serve as community centers 100%. Storytelling nights, after-school clubs, classes, dances, voter registration and voting booths... I am sure I am only grazing the surface of how libraries operate as community centers.
sbtrct 8y ago
Agreed - besides obviously checking out books, my kids (8 & 10) do a range of activities (all free to attend) at our local library - they’ve done a creative writing workshop, a science workshop, an arts & crafts session, attended a biodiversity talk and will shortly do a couple of sessions to make a stop motion animation - and that’s just in the past two months. They also often see class mates there, which adds to the social aspect of development outside of a school context.
rainbowmverse 8y ago
A newspaper interviewed a local librarian. The interviewer pointed out a lot of people use the free wifi from the parking lot after hours, and asked if that was a problem. "That's the whole point."
- spicytunacone 8y ago
  I've conducted many interviews from such parking lots. I would completely use the library more if they didn't block non-443 ports (though it's understandable that they do).
sedachv 8y ago
Not to mention that libraries have curated collections, which unlike the Kindle store are not filled with bot-generated scammer garbage: http://davidgaughran.com/2017/06/03/amazon-has-a-fake-book-problem/ http://davidgaughran.com/2017/06/03/amazon-has-a-fake-book-p...
jschwartzi 8y ago
Yeah, the guy who wrote the original article(that this piece responds to) had obviously never set foot in a library, because he still thinks of them as repositories of books. That's a function but it's not the main function. When I lived in a semi-rural area as a teenager the library was one of the few places me and my geeky friends could congregate for hours. They would let us reserve meeting rooms so we could play games together. If that library hadn't been there we would have had no third place.

keb_ 8y ago

Libraries are public institutions funded by tax payers and mainly employ civil servants and government employees. It would be terribly ironic if a public institution did not abide by the law or respect your rights. Not to mention they do not exist for profit.

ghostly_s 8y ago
> It would be terribly ironic if a public institution did not abide by the law or respect your rights. LOL. Have you been to America?
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

ajross 8y ago

> librarians (at least in that system) deliberately avoided keeping long term records of what people are reading, to safeguard privacy rights. Are you sure that's true? I mean, my local library (like most, I'm sure) has a fully digital checkout log which keeps a pretty decent amount of state for active records. A pretty reasonable architecture, given the size (small) of the system, would simply keep this data around for as long as needed. Sure, they might not be particularly diligent about backups and preservation for stale/useless data. And no, they probably aren't exploiting it to sell you ads. But I'd bet anything that they aren't deliberately purging old data. They probably have it all sitting around somewhere, because frankly that's the obvious implementation choice. Designing systems to affirmatively delete stuff (and not break in crazy ways) is actually fairly hard, and libraries aren't given to elaborate engineering. I'm willing to bet that the quote you got from the librarian was aspirational: she doesn't keep data, she cares about privacy, and she hopes and expects that the people who wrote the backend do too. My intuition says otherwise.

nandhp 8y ago
The American Library Association specifically discourages the behavior of your local library: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-management-systems http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-manag... > For example, if the LMS offers the ability to save the checkout history, this should be an opt-in feature not turned on as a default. The policy also recommends libraries minimize collection of data in general, use HTTPS whenever possible, and maintain a warrant canary. See also: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/FAQ http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/FAQ
jedberg 8y ago
I just checked my own library login, and it looks like they keep 18 months of checkout history and then purge it (or at least it is no longer available to me after that point, which means it is no longer available to the librarian because we share the same interface).
samsa 8y ago
Checkout records are going to vary from library to library depending on which software package they are using as their ILS (“integrated library system”) and how that software package is configured. My library for example (the one I work at, not my home library) has no way of knowing the checkout history of any given item except for 1) who has that item out now, if it is checked out and 2) who had it out last. In our case the database is hosted remotely by our software vendor, so we really couldn’t get at checkout data other than those two points above as that is all that displays in the staff side client, and we don’t have any servers with patron data onsite.

chrisseaton 8y ago

> Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. I think younger people are just in general more relaxed about privacy.

stcredzero 8y ago

Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? This is the difference between having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not. The customer/business relationship is a poor substitute for the real thing, even when they try to foster the trappings of false "community." there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. As it should be. There are institutions and cohorts of society trying to control access to information and opinion. This has been going on for quite some time. Noam Chomsky co-wrote a book about it in the 80's. Libraries don't play nearly as much of a role in making sure that people can access information privately as they used to, they've been shoved out of the way, but they were far more principled guardians of it than tech companies A librarian friend of mine noted that libraries had come into the business of de-facto social work.

dm319 8y ago
> having a sense of civic duty and community vs. not A sense of civic duty? These words sounds like they are from another period. I think this is low in the mindshare of the population of many western countries. As a society we're mostly concerned with personal progress, social influence and monetisation.
- metanoia 8y ago
  And this is the essential problem with society today - the lack of acknowledgement that there is such a thing as civic duty, or the greater good. It's all about personal advancement regardless of the externalized costs. In the words of Toby Keith - It's all about me, it's all about I, it's all about #1...
  - woah 8y ago
    Also, the kids these days wear funny clothes, their music is too loud, and they have no manners. We’re really going to hell in a handbasket. Also the JavaScript frameworks have too many plugins.

zouhair 8y ago

Oh well, we live in a world where people willingly and happily give all their privacy to a private entity just for the privilege to take a cab. So the future is grim.

moate 8y ago
Never mind that there's an app that combines social media and...a payment service.
- Spivak 8y ago
  I would say using Venmo is different but the idea that a social network could be built around a p2p payment service works surprisingly better than it has any right to. https://soundcloud.com/replyall/4-follow-the-money https://soundcloud.com/replyall/4-follow-the-money
  - moate 8y ago
    It's the idea that P2P payments are PUBLIC BY DEFAULT on "social media" platform and what that says about people's idea of what privacy is.
    - Spivak 8y ago
      I don't disagree but at the same time it's one setting away to make them all private forever. It could be much worse.

ensignavenger 8y ago

It wasn't that long ago that every library book had a card, and when you checked something out, your name, or a stamp/imprint of your library card number was placed on that card, when you checked the book back in, the card would be removed from a file, placed back in the book, and the book re-shelved- making it trivial to match to the person... now, you would have to look in each book and see who had checked it out, but still not very private.

Karishma1234 8y ago

While I appreciate your idea, I think you should also see the other benefits people have from Netflix/Amazon like model. Library's true customer is the reader and hence everything is designed to suite the reader. For Amazon the true customer (!) is the shareholder whose value needs to be maximised. That is why Amazon has astronomical market value where as libraries mostly depend on charity or taxpayer funding. There is a good reason why Amazon can offer you millions of products but a local library will have only thousands of books. There is a good reason why Netflix can afford to produce so much original content for your tastes but the libraries do not produce anything original. The factors you are citing are correlated. There is no value judgement here, but I think we need to appreciate the good both kind of organisations are doing to the world and they are not comparable.

zjaffee 8y ago

The more time goes on, the more I think we need to nationalize libraries beyond just the ones already owned by the federal government. In the digital age, the framework that is a local library makes less sense than there being a place to pull audiobooks/ebooks from an organization funded through the national endowment for the humanities.

tooltalk 8y ago

This is probably not true at most libraries. I used to work at one of the largest library systems in the country and they had patrons' checkout logs for at least a full-decade (in a poorly designed, insecure database system, now outsourced to a managed provider at a great cost $1M+ per year). I also don't believe they had patrons' privacy or data security as their priority -- most libraries simply never had the kind of technical competence to protect such data.

SmellTheGlove 8y ago

Total agreement. Libraries are a public good. Any disruption is going to be at least partial privatization. If it's going to remain free for the end user and not funded from public dollars, the public just became the product (to harp on that meme).

greggman 8y ago

I haven't been to a library in 30 years or so but it used to be that the list of people who borrowed the book were written in a piece of paper in the book itself. So yes, I can imagine when it was normal to be able to know who borrowed a book last. This was also common in Japan as it's important to the plot of the movie "Whispers of the Heart" (English title)

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
In my city, the libraries post signs that, immediately after you return a book and pay any late fees, they destroy all records that you ever checked any books out.
mcguire 8y ago
I think it's been longer that 30 years; the only thing I remember on the check-out slip was the due date. Which was fascinating: "Wow, no one has checked this out in a decade!"

jayd16 8y ago

This is just nostalgia at play. When you borrow a book your name goes on the slip with a timestamp. The slip is reused until its full and then its thrown away. If the slip never got full it would most likely never be replaced. Anyone who checked out the book could read the slip. Policies haven't gotten much worse. The ease of data aggregation has simply gotten much better.

jgh 8y ago

> Can you imagine Netflix or Amazon, Google or Facebook behaving this way? Could be that I'm from an older generation, but there was a time when people considered the idea of an institution having a long and complete list of everything you've read more than creepy, it was terrifying. Wasn't that more or less part of the plot of either SE7EN or Along Came a Spider (or maybe some other late-90s procedural thriller)? tl;dr they tracked down the suspect because the NSA or FBI was secretly keeping records of library checkouts.

SamReidHughes 8y ago
It was Se7en and I guess also Conspiracy Theory.