[xnorswap]

I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas.

However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. )

They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit the library, catalogue and storage isn't free and endless.

So they have a signal that no-one is borrowing these books, and they can replace it with books that do get borrowed.

Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes.

In software development terms, imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused. You want to clean up the code so you mark some endpoints as deprecated and list that in your change log.

Now imagine there's a developer who looks at the changelog for deprecation warnings, then goes out their way to develop apps that call them.

"Unloved books" might seem more romantic than un-called API endpoints, but the library needs to rotate and refresh to stay healthy.

If you want unloved books, then pick them up for next to nothing from the sale outside the library, most libraries will practically give away books they've rotated out, and you're actually doing them a favour "disposing" of them while likely giving them a token amount of money for it.

[Cthulhu_]

If the library wanted to get rid of them, they would've quietly removed the books; I suspect they want people to read them before they're removed, hence the "please give this book a chance" marker.

A deprecation marker is a "this will be removed"; these markers are "this will be removed if nobody reads them even with this marker in them".

[gcr]

Reframing this point: Some good books aren’t borrowed because they’re not discoverable, not because they’re boring.

The library is highlighting a few titles for increased visibility to ask, “would this pique a reader’s interest if they knew about it, or is this generally bad?”

Without this stage, the library would expunge more genuinely interesting titles.

I’ve always kinda felt the role of a library is for recall rather than precision

[xtajv]

"Don't judge a book by its cover" :)

[m3047]

Without digressing into spy vs spy, I think deprecation warnings (shared with the customer base) are a good thing. It might not be a good thing for sales, but that's not a concern here either. A / B testing: if I see that, then what tells me WTF is going on? (You lose me here anyway, sales.)

Agree on the language lawyering, too. ;-)

[DoctorOetker]

I had the exact same concern with the featured article: I hope they are keeping separate statistics for spontaneously browsed views vs views specifically through this page. If not, the less visited bins will rise and potentialy make all views uniform in the extreme... I also hope they keep dates for the views, with PCA you can still distinguish distinct distributions being weighted with coefficients changing over time (say because of this internal page, or any external page effectively providing the same service!)

[al_borland]

I wonders this as well. The page mentions the stat is based on “whether an art piece hasn't been visited on their website very much.” I’m wondering if since this is not on their website if that stat isn’t impacted.

[wat10000]

They clearly did have a desire to borrow that book, as evidenced by the fact that they borrowed it of their own free will. You’ve just arbitrarily decided that their reason is unworthy.

[elliottkember]

> imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused

The cost of maintaining a book is much, much less than a product feature!

[GuB-42]

I think the mission of libraries go beyond providing the most popular books. There is that, of course, a library that doesn't have the books people want is a bit pointless. But having a few titles that are not as popular help preserve something that may otherwise be lost.

[el_io]

I think I mostly agree with you, but at least OP is reading the books. If someone don't bother to read it after them it'll be marked as abandoned again.

[engineer_22]

> Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes.

Frankly, parent borrows the books and reads them. Far from malicious, maybe a bit quirky, this kind of behavior needs not be corrected, especially from an anonymous jay like yourself.