Dissecting discards

Most of my jobs in the past 2 years have included some form of a weeding project. This means that I have a nice collection of strange books that I've come across, including this fascinating bibliography:

You can see more of the book here!

If resources were in no way an issue, I would love to look at discards. I had a conversation last summer with a person who worked for Internet Archive about the organization and its quirks. One interesting thing (and there are many) about the founder of IA, Brewster Kahle, is his dedication the physical object. One of his mandates is to preserve physical books forever and he is opposed to simply throwing books out.

Brewster's dedication to the physical is also evident in the IA HQ in San Francisco:

Source: Evan Carroll

Source: Adam Gardefjord

The home of the Internet Archive is in a church in San Francisco, where the physical servers are positioned as religious objects. And if you work for IA for 3 years? You get your own "terracotta archivist" to sit in the pews. There is a concerted effort in this construction to highlight the physicality of digital objects, which are most often presented as ephemeral and living in a "cloud."

After that necessary interlude (I show this to everyone if there is any possibility to bring IA into the conversation), back to the books.

In addition to digitising, Brewster is building a "Physical Archive of the Internet Archive."

Source: Lianne Milton for The New York Times

In order to achieve this goal, people send in thousands of books. One particular story stuck out, for obvious reasons. There are, supposedly, so many copies of The Da Vinci Code sent that employees have used them as bricks to build a wall in the office. I can't confirm this, but I want to believe.

This was a long way around to my topic, but I needed to trace how I became interested in discards. Discards are often seen as the books that no longer matter; however, Brewster's 1984-ready book archive is built up on "discards," books people no longer need in their collection.

There are also a lot of political and social implications in weeding. Who gets to decide what is important to keep? Should we just get rid of books that are problematic? Who are we building collections for? There are also more pragmatic issues such as mass-volume best-sellers. High demand books such as Fifty Shades of Grey pose many problems for public libraries because after an initial surge in interest, readership dramatically wanes. What do you do with those books? There are only so many Da Vinci Code walls we can reasonably build.

The traces that discards leave behind are fascinating and likely tell interesting stories. They are marked by barcodes, old call numbers, library stamps, discard stamps -- and if they are donated to another institution, they are marked by the new library.