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HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools
Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.
Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.
Libraries are obsolete. Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.
Naturally institutions try to justify themselves and find reasons for their own continued existence. The proper response is to dismiss such efforts.
This claim is going to need an in-depth number of citations showcasing that all books that libraries host are still available and purchasable, and their prices, and comparisons with past prices, all adjusted for inflation, as well as the average income of the parents who send their kids to a particular school, also adjusted for inflation.
The justification for tearing down institutions needs to have some measure of scrutiny.
I agree and have personally started hoarding physical books again because I don't trust electronic media to persist. It's happened before. A lot of info was lost when physical periodicals were converted to microfilm and destroyed.
That said, entrusting school librarians to preserve information is like asking the Christians to preserve the pagan scrolls in Alexandria. They have no problem destroying priceless artifacts of human genius (Huck Finn, Dr. Seuss) if it fits their ever-shifting ideological goals.
What do you mean by hoarding books? Do you by as many as you can or do you select certain ones you believe will become hard or impossible to find in the future? Also why don't you trust electronic media? Wouldn't it be better to just buy hard drives and then download everything you can come by via torrents, libgen e.t.c. and figure out some sort of backup plan?
I just mean that I'm buying physical books instead of electronic now. I'm not planning on being an Irish monk keeping the flame through the Dark Ages.
I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.
What I don't trust in electronic media is this:
Corporations controlling art. For example, publishers changing the words to old Roald Dahl books and pushing this to people's devices.
Flawed digital conversion and storage processes. We know that books can last for hundreds of years with little human effort. In the 20th century, there was a large-scale effort to convert books and periodicals to microfilm with the original media destroyed. This destroyed a lot of knowledge. Even if microfilm readers weren't inferior to books (they are), the process destroyed information because it was done in a low-resolution way. Sometimes the conversion didn't work at all and the text was lost entirely. In other cases, information is made inaccessible because old devices no longer work. Is there going to be a machine capable of reading my 2020s era hard drive in 100 years? Original media should be preserved.
Corporations controlling personal information. We've all heard tales of corporations like Google destroying people's information or locking them out of their accounts. Why would we hold media with companies like this when we can just have physical?
Why mention RAID? I’m honestly curious because this comes up a lot with data hoarding. RAID helps with maintaining uptime and availability for an applications during a disk failure, but it does not provide backups. With RAID your capacity investment is diminished by mirroring or parity storage cost, which could be better allocated to additional backup media. Do you agree?
Quite possibly. I haven't really given it much thought TBH. I just think digital archival methods don't have a great (or long) track record. Certainly, any one person's efforts wouldn't be likely to survive their death.
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