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Interestingly this came up again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002419 Librarians ha
by sevensor 8y ago
Interestingly this came up again just the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002419
Librarians have to weed their collections regularly, or see them overrun with bad books. Due to changes in interest or deteriorating condition, some books need to be purged so that the important ones can be maintained and new ones can be brought in.
This was a liberating idea for me, as I'm a bibliophile from a family of bibliophiles. Your collection is only as good as your curation.
- zellyn 8y agoI can't believe that discussion (now un-commentable) didn't include a link to http://awfullibrarybooks.net/ http://awfullibrarybooks.net/. Good stuff.
- sevensor 8y agoWow, I'm really glad this site exists! It's been a while since I fell down an internet rabbithole like it.
- selectodude 8y agoExactly. A museum doesn’t hang some random kid’s art next to a Picasso. They don’t even have room to hang all the Picassos and some of them aren’t actually all that good. Holding onto every book you’ve ever gotten your hands on is just hoarding.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThe internet has had some interesting repercussions for the idea that all knowledge is worth saving. We're producing data many orders of magnitude than ever before, and it's easier to save it than ever before, and 99% of it is completely useless and uninteresting outside of its original context, even for hypothetical future historians. As you say, the goal shouldn't be to save everything just in case, but to weed out the irretrievably useless and carefully index the rest.