I always found it interesting how hacker culture is largely propped up on the protections society has carved out for librarians following world war 2 (where certain sections of society had been identified based on what books they had looked at).
The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and only given protection by western europe after clear and serious abuse.
Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.
I grew up in an extremely repressed and abusive household. I wasn't allowed to watch the majority of television or film, and my room was regularly searched for offending non-Christian records and such.
My aunt was the librarian at my elementary and middle school. I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots.
Out of sympathy, my aunt allowed me to access the "forbidden zone" of adult books of which our school apparently had a large cache, hidden in the back rooms. She didn't tell my guardians, and I can't overstate how important this was for me. I've always deeply admired her work and attitude towards information accessibility, and it left an indelible mark on me.
And this is why things like requiring identification to access the Internet is a bad idea, and the narrative it's wrapped in - "protecting the children" - is really more about keeping children away from differing viewpoints
Kids should have to identify themselves to access the Internet. I echo part of a previous comment from a ways back:
> I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry.
And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured.
But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person.
I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems.
A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that.
It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.
The next/current phase of the library and librarian is as a community center, and not exactly a center of information. Instead it will be eyed for its physical accommodations for purposes like student meeting rooms, or tutors who rent rooms to sell their services.
Mine has rooms to park your kids in with cartoons playing on a TV. I want my kids to be interested in reading, not watching cartoons. When I discussed this with them, their answer was "Well, kids aren't that interested in books anymore."
Yes - they built a huge new library in the town next over as the old one was overflowing with books and then only moved about 1/5 of the books over when it was completed. They disappeared the entire CS section. But it has about 5 unused meeting rooms, an unused “media maker space” and an enormous light filled open second floor area with two couches.
Every school librarian I ever had fought against the administration constantly about restricting access to "banned books".
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.
I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
> I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
Yes, but that was already a given, and is the entire topic of this thread. Librarians in many cases became involved in the struggle for access to information even if "the community" didn't agree. I was raised in an extremely backwards, religiously zealous, racist, totalitarian-supporting Deep South state and never once have I thought, "I better do what the community thinks".
> The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Pat yourself on the back, you've discovered that librarians have to make compromises in order to continually push the envelope and not undo all of the progress that has been made. This is called politics.
The whole idea that "banned book week" is a time when students learn to think for themselves is silly, then. It's merely a time when one authority figure who doesn't like another authority figure grabs the reigns. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
> We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter).
They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.
I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school.
> The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter)
I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter at my home, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I wasn't allowed to read books with sexual content, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I was raised by massively abusive religious extremists. I didn't give a fuck about their attempts to control my mind then, and as an adult now I don't give a fuck about other idiots' attempts to control their kids minds now.
My guardians did every single thing they could think of to stunt my growth and turn me into a good little Catholic extremist. You simply won't understand unless you have been through such a horrible experience, as a curious mind with a voracious appetite for knowledge.
"I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."
What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf? Makes no sense, doubt it's true, and obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level, let alone content.
Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?
> obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level
I had a collegiate reading level in first grade... I taught myself to read at age 3 in order to escape my situation. I should not have to suffer because other people did not invest the same amount of time and energy into their literacy.
> What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf?
I learned about Hitler and why he was a massive piece of shit, but also formed my viewpoint while considering all available information and opinions, instead of just internalizing what other people told me.
They also are banning books that are critical of authoritarian governments, because they don’t want their children to resent the one they’ve chosen to install here.
Every single one of the books you listed were suggested to me by a teacher. It often felt like some of my teachers latched onto my strong ethical stances and continual disregard for the brand of institutional authoritarianism common in the Deep South, and felt compelled to nurture it.
Of course, it goes both ways. Plenty of teachers fixated on the idea of breaking me and making me fall in line. By middle school I had over 50 write-ups, a few suspensions, and had been subject to corporal punishment (literal State violence) mainly for "willful disobedience", a derogatory term which always confused me because I felt it positively described exactly what I was doing. In middle school, that number exploded as some authoritarian teachers became fixated on forcing me to adhere to school uniforms or demanding that I stood and participated in the cult-like Pledge of Allegiance, attempting to embarrass me in front of the class or to get my guardians to whip and punish me at home.
Public school was a battleground for the future of our society. It felt like 99% of people at the time simply didn't understand that. The few teachers who "saw" me and did what they could to help me navigate my abusive and restrictive home life became the most important people in the world to me, and I owe everything to them.
Mein Kampf is just the most stark example of a book that is forbidden, but very significant to read if you want to understand WWII history. Uncle Tom's Cabin is another example of a book you wont see but is another piece of literature you should read if you want to understand the ideology of a given time period. You don't have to agree with a book to read it.
Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
I'm pretty sure nobody commenting here actually wants Mein Kampf in particular. It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict. (The Anarchist Cookbook would probably be better if we need to pick a single work.)
... and since it's well known, its presence can get improperly used as a proxy for "this library is uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get restricted anyway.
The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. I had to acquire that from the internet.
The people responding here mainly just come across as either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if they can prove that in some cases the school administration overruled our teachers and librarians on the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and not useful
No one here seems to have actually made a real point, just looking for "gotchas".
Mein Kampf has been available at every school I've been at. It's not part of the curriculum but why would it be? Libraries usually have it because they have robust collections on authoritarianism for obvious reasons.
The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.
My guess is there are forums somewhere where people complain a lot about librarians not giving access to Nazi material and how it's a crime against free speech absolutism.
Yeah but do they include the spicy ones like Mein Kampf or just the ones that agree with their politics. It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.
The point they’re trying to make is the librarian is already the censor by the fact that they decide what books to buy.
The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want.
I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.
I get your meaning but it feels overly reductive. I'd call good faith picking a catalog and not trying to prevent people from finding certain books "curation". I'd call "delete anything that says gay" censorship.
It's hard to have an objective standard. A curator and a censor are both trying to pick content they think is appropriate for their community.
There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog. I would think most librarians would consider adding requested content or at least referring the patron to another library or other means to access it.
> There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog.
My partner is a librarian and I can tell you they frequently add books they personally dislike or outright loathe (be it for content reasons or if they just think it's a bad book).
This can happen at the request of the community, or even if they believe somebody in the community might want said book.
This "curation is actually censorship" balderdash is completely out of touch with what library curation looks like and how librarians work and see their responsibility to their community
I think the point is that whoever is in charge of curation can (and likely sometimes do) quietly and easily delete anything that says gay without anyone really noticing
Then those same people will often make a fuss when someone else tells them what they are allowed to curate
> It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
At least in Germany, virtually all public libraries are interconnected with each other, so if one library doesn't have a particular book, another one which has it can send the book their way. And in the case that there's no library at all holding it in stock in all of Germany (which is damn near impossible), as long as the printers have fulfilled their legal obligation to send at least two copies of the book to the National Library, they'll be the "library of last resort".
This interconnection is the case in the US as well. It's trivial to get books within the same regional system, and you can do inter library loans for pretty much any other library in the country (though not the Library of Congress, which is the US "library of last resort").
The core "engineer mindset" is solving interesting problems. The core librarian mindset is connecting people with the information they are seeking. That's what drives them.
Just a comment that the library has become my "third space" these days.
I am sooo grateful my local University library is open for public visitors. I visit every weekend and enjoy fast internet, a pleasant and quiet environment and can plug my laptop into one of many large desktop monitors here.
Look, I love the sentiment, and the illustrations are charming.
Unfortunately, the writing.
It's...stilted.
It's presented as a letter/email, but it reads as though the author wants you to hear someone with good comedic timing... DELIVERING IT LIKE STANDUP!
But ellipses...do not translate to funnier text. The text just has to be funny! "Pauses" only enhance what's already there!
> write a quippy, funny letter from a "concerned citizen" to their community highlighting the "danger" posed by librarians. said "danger" is their vendetta against ignorance, illiteracy. style should involve SUDDEN CAPS FOR EMPHASIS, ellipses...for...artificial comedic timing. But there's something more important to the style. Something being demonstrated in this very sentence. Yes - it's *short, narration-like rhythms". These shorter sentences should occupy their own paragraph.
If you can replicate a blog post with a single LLM prompt, you start to wonder whether the author had the same thought.
Why is criticism bucketed with cynicism? I led with my appreciation of the good things in the post.
When the day comes that I post something of mine on HN, I will be tremendously disappointed if all of the comments are the textual equivalent of a participation trophy.
do enough PR reviews and you start think everything is one. alternatively, with the causality reversed, explains why most people are pricks in PR reviews.
Aren't you the guy saying we need to extralegally hang the people in charge of the federal government? Wish I had advice to offer you in turn but holy cow man idk
Yes, historically it's been the way to defeat fascism. I'm not the one mad about a light hearted article about libraries lol. More pissed about the end of the US and illegal deportations, the president scamming people with shitcoins, ignoring the judicial branch, shit like that.
Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.
I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what medical book covered the proper stuff.
Okay. The point is that someone, yes, SOMEONE, needs to make the call as to what goes on the shelves. Mien kampf? The Anachist's Cook Book? Lady Chatterley's Lover? Is is librarians who make the decision AND IT IS NOT THE SAME FOR EVERY LIBRARY GOER!!!! Yep. They consider who's asking and why. They are some of the few remaining trusted professionals, and they remain so because we think they're harmless drudges. Power to 'em!
A fun fact that please excuse me if off-topic: Mao Zedong was a librarian before he started the Bolshevik Revolution in China, and then he changed all of China. So it's often said in China that it's really dangerous to upset a librarian.
The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the attention span for good books. Libraries are getting rid of the classics to make room for new books, the majority of which are not worth the paper they’re printed on. We would do well to heed C.S. Lewis’ call to read more old books for every new book that we read.
I personally think the focus on attention span is a red herring.
Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text
I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.
People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.
It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
I wonder if it's not that people are getting dumber or less able to hold attention; rather, that everyone is being more exposed to lowest common denominator material because of efficient distribution.
Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store and was very commercially successful. Most people who consumed more advanced content ignored it.
> People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine.
This. Both movies and series are now FAR less popular (and profitable) than video games, and video games are far less popular than social media. Even the minority that still enjoys legacy media enjoys it WHILE consuming other media.
Movie theaters are in as much trouble as libraries, and blaming either of them for their decline in popularity without mentioning the root causes would be myopic.
The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought that lasts longer than the length of a TikTok video or tweet are dying.
I’ve come to the same conclusion after years of feeling like the idiot for not being able to sit through books. If people aren’t making it through your book, they might have a short attention span but your book also might just be bloated, unclear, or uninteresting. It may even not have set expectations well enough. As Brandon Sanderson says, it’s very easy to skip out on the last half of Into The Woods if you don’t know who Stephen Sondheim is as a writer.
Early in life I learned the rule: If one person is a jerk, he's just a jerk. If you feel like everyone is a jerk, you are probably the one being a jerk.
The same is true of books. If you think one book is bad, it's probably the book. If you think all/most books are slow you should work on your attention span.
Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that people are using.
Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
This has been an ongoing discussion within libraries for more than a hundred years not a recent issue. Should libraries be a place with classics to uplift people or popular books that people want to read even if they are low quality?
I used to skip school for at least two days to go to the big library in my city. I taught myself a lot of things. Did have access to books and high speed internet (by this era standards anyway) that I couldn't have or afford at home.
I wouldn't encourage people to skip school to do that of course. But I owe this period of my life a lot of what I am today. Someone with interest in science and tech. I have known some of the people working there and they were happy helping me navigating the library (and grap books for the short boy who is too short for most of the shelves).
I wasn't happy with how it turned out the last year when I visited.
Ideas are dangerous, librarians just stockpile and distribute them. In terms of potential energy books are more disruptive than nukes. The keepers who wrangle their power should have proportional status.
You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library. So they should be accorded status based on that power, but there also should be accountability and transparency.
> You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library.
But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
> but there also should be accountability and transparency.
There is. 'Books on the shelf' is a gold standard of transparency. They are showing their work in the fullest possible measure.
In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith. The appropriate accountability for that is letting them do their jobs.
> In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
A thousand times this. People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.
Librarians take their responsibility to their community seriously. This responsibility, to them, is nothing less than presenting their patrons with all of the information (books and beyond) that they are trying to access, regardless of their personal feelings about said information.
While librarians can be "dangerous", libraries can be extremely beautiful (or vice versa, who knows...?). When traveling, I often try to visit ones, and, of course, we have some iconic photographs of them too.
My local libary is great for me at the point I am at life. Clean bathrooms, 3d printers and laser cutters, video conference rooms, free videos to watch, comfy chairs, a huge manga section. Not a lot of physical books anymore. I guess I can just use an e-reader and check one out that way. No more discovery.
I miss the days when they shushed people. Nowadays, librarians where I go (to several local libraries) are invariably the loudest, most shameless talkers in the place.
Many of my coolest collaborators have been library science or information studies people. They are just the people I trust the most to have a sensible balanced worldview between theory and action, and with enough distance to understand the false idols of capital and power.
I feel librarians so often get to be the sort of people that teachers wish they could be, if those teachers weren't so micro-managed by the state and the system
It seems relevant to this article, and its portrayal of librarians as dangerous, that the national Institute for Museum and Library Services was recently essentially destroyed by Presidential executive order and DOGE, probably illegally, its grants largely or entirely revoked, and its employees laid off.
I've been working in the space the last few years and what I've gathered is Librarians themselves often hate what libraries have become. The ones working in University libraries seem to enjoy their job a lot more than the ones in large cities that act as homeless shelters.
I have begun taking my children to the local library, and I am shocked at how bad the selection is. There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest. And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang. This is wildly different from the collections that I grew up with, in libraries trashed now by standard publishing spam, despite having vastly more money and space than they did when I was a kid.
Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has little or nothing to do with "battling" misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be about librarians championing a very bland and particular political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.
My town votes 50/50 Republican/Democrat, yet our newly rebuilt library is filled with lib/women oriented non-fiction and contemporary women’s pulp fiction. They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias. It’s not possible to learn much about science or technology there anymore - they weeded much of that out during the remodeling.
I don't doubt you, but in many locations you don't have to take your children to the local library. For example I lived in Sunnyvale for a long time, and yet after visiting the nearby libraries I decided to get a library card at the Mountain View public library. It doesn't matter I don't live or work in Mountain View.
In this particular city, at least, it's cultural malaise, and one that is hard to escape just by going to another branch. That said, there are some good used bookstores out here (not the big chain stores) that have great collections.
> There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest.
I've noticed this at my library as well. I was shocked that there wasn't a copy of Spinoza's Ethics which seems kinda basic. That being said, I think people underestimate how much garbage each generation produces. Past generations have done the work of curating the good stuff of their time for us.
> And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about but I'm going to take a leap and assume you're complaining about the presence of LQBTQ books in the library. I've noticed this trend where conservatives think that any book with queer characters is sexual by definition. People get upset by children's books with 2 dads that are just like any other book and it's honestly tiring. Queer people exist and have normal, boring lives and there's nothing inherently sexual or pornagraphic about that.
In a world with so many different opinions, where you know neither my nation or city or native language, it's odd that you would immediately jump to this. After all, my library could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era revanchist apologists, or so on. Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means it either.
Let's not jump to the gun here. It could be as well that there's nothing there, or so on. And being accused of something you didn't is something I think we'd all want to not deal with.
That being said, I do also very much hope it's not what you say because I've been noticing that trend too :(
Fully agree. It's a marvel how this HN post is both a paean to anti-censorship and to "dangerous ideas"—and, simultaneously, a complaint thread about libraries stocking books they don't like, why won't they remove them?
That’s because librarians have been making a concerted effort to “deaccession” (throw them into the dumpster or send them for pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters into ideological territory - old books might contain unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them.
In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries.
> Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
I think you might be missing that there are many different types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents.
Just a few days ago, I visited the community college library reference desk. We were discussing and browsing the shrinking stacks of reference volumes.
I commented that some of these extant books must be kept because it was difficult to typeset or compile them electronically, and I pointed out a “Lakota language dictionary”...
but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me, and she said that electronic resources were great and fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue, because the Lady of the House is always right
There's something about that that simply sounds dangerous to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a certain resiliency in keeping printed copies of reference materials: they cannot be changed, disappeared (other than unloading them into the bin), or made impossible to access (unless the library starts putting books behind lock and key). If I want to learn about gardening (for example), I'd much rather get a reference text at the library than search for stuff online... which half the time is clickbaity or AI-generated trash.
Yep. My local library when I was a kid I get to on my bike, and I looked for books on computing topics. I ended up with a book that was a compilation of articles from Dr. Dobb's Journal.
In the late 90s, there was a cornucopia of amazing books available - one was on programming Windows, and came complete with a CD in the back with a fully working copy of Visual Studio C++ 1.52.
I decided to poke into the library my kids go to for story time and see what computer books there were. It was truly bleak. There was really nothing that would bring back the sense of discovery I had as a kid going to the library.
My local library was much denser as a child as well.
Except that's because the library was tiny. The denseness was a necessity and the library was constantly trying to get rid of books to make room for newer books.
Thankfully they eventually replaced that tiny library with a much bigger one. And the one we live near now is also much bigger and much better. I think the kids section of the library is probably double the size of the entire library we had growing up, with more books as well.
I mean, they were never so narrow that a wheelchair wouldn't fit.
I guess the benefit is that now two people in wheelchairs can pass each other, thus avoiding one of them needing to spend a few seconds going backwards.
Because I saw others here speak about their libraries, I will too.
I'm Polish, I live in a big city. My libraries around, are, to say it mildly, awful. At best, they'll contain old school readings, some history book from communist period and old tech manuals (old as in, Win 95 guides or for tech that is no longer used).
sounds like underfunding issues, but they're trying their best with what they have. And as others have said, they are important community spaces for studying, meetups etc.
Treating “knowledge” in the abstract is dangerous. “Knowledge” consists of manuscripts . A book store or library is merely a curation of those manuscripts (or their copies).
Librarians actually are dangerous, in that they present “knowledge” as neutral, and “more knowledge” as an unquestionable good. Nearly all librarians and book store clerks share a skewed ideology.
Everyone expects a Christian, Muslim or Jewish book store to be filled with a tailored curation of books. Libraries and book stores are ironically treated as neutral “knowledge repositories”.
My point is that every collection is curated according to the taste and the agenda of the curator or librarian.
It is the quality of the collection that makes it good, not the volume. Librarians are dangerous because they’ve convinced the public that they are gatekeepers of knowledge, when they are actually just curators.
I wish much of the lore about librarians were actually true, but these days they seem to be mostly focused on either filling up dumpsters full of old books for sale (why are they getting rid of all of the old books), stocking the shelves with DVDs (why are libraries in the movie-rental business?), or else organising things that seem to be quite tangentional to being a "library". For example, I think it's fine to take family photos or ID photos for kids... but is this really the primary mission of a library?
When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000. (Of course, we all know the Amazon prices are basically made up - offering books for sale that aren't in stock, and on the chance they get an order at an outrageous price, go try and find it cheap on the secondary market.)
Nonetheless, they're always asking for money - whether applying for grants, putting property tax levies on the ballot, attempting to raise sales taxes, despite the ever-decreasing levels of service, alongside requisite threats "If we don't pass this item, the library will close!!!"
I view librarians as ones that completely missed the boat when it comes to their traditional domain of organising indexes to literature, which has been eclipsed first by Google, and now by AI in general.
The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and only given protection by western europe after clear and serious abuse.
Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.
My aunt was the librarian at my elementary and middle school. I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots.
Out of sympathy, my aunt allowed me to access the "forbidden zone" of adult books of which our school apparently had a large cache, hidden in the back rooms. She didn't tell my guardians, and I can't overstate how important this was for me. I've always deeply admired her work and attitude towards information accessibility, and it left an indelible mark on me.
> I would not be the person I am today without early unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career, while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's certainly not a good thing I carry.
And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of this has anything to do with viewpoints. I wish I had found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about animals and people being tortured.
But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me being a more well rounded person.
I think a far more effective actionable path here is disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding how their children are raised. We still ascribe very diligently to the Western notion that children effectively "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the single authority figure that decides how this person is raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that, for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable choice, is horrendous. This is a whole other person, this child is, and in our current system they are effectively a resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18 (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems.
A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter, but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon reams of evidence of parents doing inconceivable evils to their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced rights? They're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial. They do not have the right to free association, parents destroy relationships their children have all the time, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect, sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities, and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put a hard limit on even that.
It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if said rights are potentially to be utilized against this unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.
They told me that one too.
Overstate?
Librarians and libraries are more like community outreach centers now that you can Google anything.
Many are struggling to help people with media literacy, and I don't know of any that are really doing a great job with that.
It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.
The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Yes, but that was already a given, and is the entire topic of this thread. Librarians in many cases became involved in the struggle for access to information even if "the community" didn't agree. I was raised in an extremely backwards, religiously zealous, racist, totalitarian-supporting Deep South state and never once have I thought, "I better do what the community thinks".
> The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Pat yourself on the back, you've discovered that librarians have to make compromises in order to continually push the envelope and not undo all of the progress that has been made. This is called politics.
These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter).
They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.
> The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter)
I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter at my home, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I wasn't allowed to read books with sexual content, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I was raised by massively abusive religious extremists. I didn't give a fuck about their attempts to control my mind then, and as an adult now I don't give a fuck about other idiots' attempts to control their kids minds now.
My guardians did every single thing they could think of to stunt my growth and turn me into a good little Catholic extremist. You simply won't understand unless you have been through such a horrible experience, as a curious mind with a voracious appetite for knowledge.
What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf? Makes no sense, doubt it's true, and obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level, let alone content.
Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?
> obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level
I had a collegiate reading level in first grade... I taught myself to read at age 3 in order to escape my situation. I should not have to suffer because other people did not invest the same amount of time and energy into their literacy.
> What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf?
I learned about Hitler and why he was a massive piece of shit, but also formed my viewpoint while considering all available information and opinions, instead of just internalizing what other people told me.
The perks of being a wallflower has been banned. 13 reasons why. Slaughterhouse 5. The Decameron. Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Grapes of Wrath.
Do I need to keep going? The sexual nonsense has been used recently to ban lgbt books, as if queer kids aren't a thing that exists.
Of course, it goes both ways. Plenty of teachers fixated on the idea of breaking me and making me fall in line. By middle school I had over 50 write-ups, a few suspensions, and had been subject to corporal punishment (literal State violence) mainly for "willful disobedience", a derogatory term which always confused me because I felt it positively described exactly what I was doing. In middle school, that number exploded as some authoritarian teachers became fixated on forcing me to adhere to school uniforms or demanding that I stood and participated in the cult-like Pledge of Allegiance, attempting to embarrass me in front of the class or to get my guardians to whip and punish me at home.
Public school was a battleground for the future of our society. It felt like 99% of people at the time simply didn't understand that. The few teachers who "saw" me and did what they could to help me navigate my abusive and restrictive home life became the most important people in the world to me, and I owe everything to them.
Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
... and since it's well known, its presence can get improperly used as a proxy for "this library is uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get restricted anyway.
The people responding here mainly just come across as either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if they can prove that in some cases the school administration overruled our teachers and librarians on the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and not useful
No one here seems to have actually made a real point, just looking for "gotchas".
The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.
My guess is there are forums somewhere where people complain a lot about librarians not giving access to Nazi material and how it's a crime against free speech absolutism.
> It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.
They did. Oh, they did. Lots of parents got pissed every year. Censors will censor.
The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want.
I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.
There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog. I would think most librarians would consider adding requested content or at least referring the patron to another library or other means to access it.
My partner is a librarian and I can tell you they frequently add books they personally dislike or outright loathe (be it for content reasons or if they just think it's a bad book).
This can happen at the request of the community, or even if they believe somebody in the community might want said book.
This "curation is actually censorship" balderdash is completely out of touch with what library curation looks like and how librarians work and see their responsibility to their community
Then those same people will often make a fuss when someone else tells them what they are allowed to curate
At least in Germany, virtually all public libraries are interconnected with each other, so if one library doesn't have a particular book, another one which has it can send the book their way. And in the case that there's no library at all holding it in stock in all of Germany (which is damn near impossible), as long as the printers have fulfilled their legal obligation to send at least two copies of the book to the National Library, they'll be the "library of last resort".
The core "engineer mindset" is solving interesting problems. The core librarian mindset is connecting people with the information they are seeking. That's what drives them.
We've actually had to travel (as in physically drive to D.C.) to the Library of Congress because it was the only place that had a book.
The censor orders seafood, a live show with pyrotechnics, and the dishwasher's birth certificate.
I am sooo grateful my local University library is open for public visitors. I visit every weekend and enjoy fast internet, a pleasant and quiet environment and can plug my laptop into one of many large desktop monitors here.
Unfortunately, the writing.
It's...stilted.
It's presented as a letter/email, but it reads as though the author wants you to hear someone with good comedic timing... DELIVERING IT LIKE STANDUP!
But ellipses...do not translate to funnier text. The text just has to be funny! "Pauses" only enhance what's already there!
> write a quippy, funny letter from a "concerned citizen" to their community highlighting the "danger" posed by librarians. said "danger" is their vendetta against ignorance, illiteracy. style should involve SUDDEN CAPS FOR EMPHASIS, ellipses...for...artificial comedic timing. But there's something more important to the style. Something being demonstrated in this very sentence. Yes - it's *short, narration-like rhythms". These shorter sentences should occupy their own paragraph.
If you can replicate a blog post with a single LLM prompt, you start to wonder whether the author had the same thought.
When the day comes that I post something of mine on HN, I will be tremendously disappointed if all of the comments are the textual equivalent of a participation trophy.
Seems like you think PRs are the only place where criticism happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_War
Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.
I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what medical book covered the proper stuff.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/book-and-dagger-elyse...
Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.
People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.
It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store and was very commercially successful. Most people who consumed more advanced content ignored it.
This. Both movies and series are now FAR less popular (and profitable) than video games, and video games are far less popular than social media. Even the minority that still enjoys legacy media enjoys it WHILE consuming other media.
Movie theaters are in as much trouble as libraries, and blaming either of them for their decline in popularity without mentioning the root causes would be myopic.
The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought that lasts longer than the length of a TikTok video or tweet are dying.
The same is true of books. If you think one book is bad, it's probably the book. If you think all/most books are slow you should work on your attention span.
Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
Try going back in time and explaining to Neil Postman that people today find watching TV to be a chore that needs abbreviation or summarization.
I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
I wouldn't encourage people to skip school to do that of course. But I owe this period of my life a lot of what I am today. Someone with interest in science and tech. I have known some of the people working there and they were happy helping me navigating the library (and grap books for the short boy who is too short for most of the shelves).
I wasn't happy with how it turned out the last year when I visited.
But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.
> but there also should be accountability and transparency.
There is. 'Books on the shelf' is a gold standard of transparency. They are showing their work in the fullest possible measure.
In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith. The appropriate accountability for that is letting them do their jobs.
Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.
A thousand times this. People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.
Librarians take their responsibility to their community seriously. This responsibility, to them, is nothing less than presenting their patrons with all of the information (books and beyond) that they are trying to access, regardless of their personal feelings about said information.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737275
While librarians can be "dangerous", libraries can be extremely beautiful (or vice versa, who knows...?). When traveling, I often try to visit ones, and, of course, we have some iconic photographs of them too.
Many of my coolest collaborators have been library science or information studies people. They are just the people I trust the most to have a sensible balanced worldview between theory and action, and with enough distance to understand the false idols of capital and power.
I feel librarians so often get to be the sort of people that teachers wish they could be, if those teachers weren't so micro-managed by the state and the system
See, e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/11/trum...
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
Just look at the long list of major book-burning incidents throughout history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents
Books are dangerous, because knowledge is dangerous -- dangerous to ignorance, censorship, and misinformation.
Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has little or nothing to do with "battling" misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be about librarians championing a very bland and particular political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.
I've noticed this at my library as well. I was shocked that there wasn't a copy of Spinoza's Ethics which seems kinda basic. That being said, I think people underestimate how much garbage each generation produces. Past generations have done the work of curating the good stuff of their time for us.
> And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about but I'm going to take a leap and assume you're complaining about the presence of LQBTQ books in the library. I've noticed this trend where conservatives think that any book with queer characters is sexual by definition. People get upset by children's books with 2 dads that are just like any other book and it's honestly tiring. Queer people exist and have normal, boring lives and there's nothing inherently sexual or pornagraphic about that.
That being said, I do also very much hope it's not what you say because I've been noticing that trend too :(
In some places it’s particularly absurd, for example, here’s one that had the school libraries junk anything written before 2008: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...
A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea that “well, it’s available online” - even as those resources are lost. There’s a lot of long tail works on niche historical, scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever, aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books in your library and reading them.
In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though, but even at large, old research libraries.
They can also wield the sword of censorship, hiding or discarding books they don't personally like, and fronting all the ones they do.
I think you might be missing that there are many different types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents.
I commented that some of these extant books must be kept because it was difficult to typeset or compile them electronically, and I pointed out a “Lakota language dictionary”...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language
but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me, and she said that electronic resources were great and fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue, because the Lady of the House is always right
Now when I visit it's always meh. They have sacrificed breadth and density for "curation" and "experience spaces".
The space between the book shelves seems to have almost doubled. Why?
Bring back super high dense book shelving filled with interesting stuff.
In the late 90s, there was a cornucopia of amazing books available - one was on programming Windows, and came complete with a CD in the back with a fully working copy of Visual Studio C++ 1.52.
I decided to poke into the library my kids go to for story time and see what computer books there were. It was truly bleak. There was really nothing that would bring back the sense of discovery I had as a kid going to the library.
Except that's because the library was tiny. The denseness was a necessity and the library was constantly trying to get rid of books to make room for newer books.
Thankfully they eventually replaced that tiny library with a much bigger one. And the one we live near now is also much bigger and much better. I think the kids section of the library is probably double the size of the entire library we had growing up, with more books as well.
Accessibility is probably a factor, narrow spaces are hard to navigate with a wheelchair.
I guess the benefit is that now two people in wheelchairs can pass each other, thus avoiding one of them needing to spend a few seconds going backwards.
Sure thing but your community would have to pay insignificantly more in local taxes
The primary goal of libraries is to educate the public - not to employ librarians, right?
I'm Polish, I live in a big city. My libraries around, are, to say it mildly, awful. At best, they'll contain old school readings, some history book from communist period and old tech manuals (old as in, Win 95 guides or for tech that is no longer used).
I really envy Americans in this aspect.
and yup, they are certainly underfunded and i don't envy them, i do believe that most of them are trying to do as much as they can. :(
Librarians actually are dangerous, in that they present “knowledge” as neutral, and “more knowledge” as an unquestionable good. Nearly all librarians and book store clerks share a skewed ideology.
Everyone expects a Christian, Muslim or Jewish book store to be filled with a tailored curation of books. Libraries and book stores are ironically treated as neutral “knowledge repositories”.
My point is that every collection is curated according to the taste and the agenda of the curator or librarian.
It is the quality of the collection that makes it good, not the volume. Librarians are dangerous because they’ve convinced the public that they are gatekeepers of knowledge, when they are actually just curators.
When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over $1,000. (Of course, we all know the Amazon prices are basically made up - offering books for sale that aren't in stock, and on the chance they get an order at an outrageous price, go try and find it cheap on the secondary market.)
Nonetheless, they're always asking for money - whether applying for grants, putting property tax levies on the ballot, attempting to raise sales taxes, despite the ever-decreasing levels of service, alongside requisite threats "If we don't pass this item, the library will close!!!"
I view librarians as ones that completely missed the boat when it comes to their traditional domain of organising indexes to literature, which has been eclipsed first by Google, and now by AI in general.