I was reading a recent article about the efforts by people not to ban books. While I think the sentiment is good-natured, as a helper at my local library, this is actually very problematic. People donate to us all the time, as is how libraries work. Sometimes the books are unpopular, unproductive, harmful, or just low tier.
I would never apply this logic to human beings, all humans have value if the system knows how to channel them correctly, but books are inanimate objects where their expected purpose is to be read (if you were to say a book is useful on the basis it could be used for something like ripping the pages out for wiping a floor for example, that would make its usefulness as a book cease). Often we are over capacity from the donations, so once a year we have a book sale at the church (libraries and churches getting along? Crazy, right?), but even then, a lot just isn’t sold, and we’re forced to either give them to another holding place or, in the worst case scenario, cremate or trash them. I am all for free speech, but freedom to produce speech is different from freedom to preserve speech, and I’m sure even the ancient Romans produced a lot of scribbly nonsense.
Suppose you were in my shoes and the library could preserve anything forever but not everything forever. What criteria would you use in order to decide what media (books, movies, games, etc.) gets to stay and what has to go?
Coin flip.
Less time spent deciding what’s important, and more time spent improving the service to the point where overpopulation isn’t a problem.
By the way, random selection is one of the few methods to guarantee a fair and representatative sample.
In case of a library I’d want at least part of the catalog represent media of the times is was created, because science also uses that.
One reason archaelogy in Pompei is valuable is that everyrhing - including pornograhic graffiti and slander was preserved, giving us a different perspective into those times than books by medieval historians.
Of course, I’d also want - in another part of the catalog - books/media by manually selected scientists, artists, historians.