cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/53671520

I asked a library system to furnish their whole catalog of books, music, and movies in an open format (JSON, XML, or CSV). They refused, saying that the database is extremely large, composed of several hundred thousand bibliographic records that reference over 2 million documents. They say the database is highly dynamic and it would be obsolete by the time they export the data and likely not useful to more than one person.

So they have opted to limit everyone to using their web-based search. Is my request unreasonable? Or their response?

I’m trying to get a basic idea of the size we are talking about. I’m guessing 100,000 bibliographic records would consume roughly 100mb uncompressed (guessing an avg. record would not exceed 1k). And since text compresses very well, a zipped JSON would be what, ~10mb per 100k records? I believe a zip file of 900,000 bibliographies would be ~65mb.

The library did not give precise figures but I would like to work out what level of crazy my request is. Do any libraries in the world export a dataset of 100s of 1000s of book and media titles? Because if it’s done /somewhere/, it would give a clue about the reasonableness of my request.

I’ll give a couple use cases in case anyone is wondering how direct DB access would be useful.

Use case 1:

1. fetch a list of titles of interest, e.g. award-winners (books, scripts, actors, musicians, directors, etc), or a list of banned books, because if it’s banned somewhere maybe it piques your curiosity
2. search the library’s DB for matches against a list

If the list is more than ~15 or so items, you’re fucked because library query forms rarely accept a list as input. And as soon as you need to specify other criteria like works in English with a date range, the chance of a web form doing the job becomes increasing unlikely.

Use case 2: Suppose you are boycotting something or want to avoid something or someone (e.g. you want to avoid Tom Hanks because he is a sell-out with no sense of brand protection, who will act in any garbage film if it pays enough)

1. fetch a list of titles you want to avoid (e.g. if you boycott Disney, get a list of Disney titles; or get a list of movies Tom Hanks was in)
2. search the library’s DB for whatever you are looking for, but exclude matches against a list

Or you have a looooonng list of movies you have already seen or books you have read. Obviously you might want to exclude them from your queries.

Use case 3: The library has an extremely limited sense of genres. A conversation went like this:

Me: “Where is the EDM section? Where is the ambient and trip-hop section?” Librarian: “what’s that?” Me: Electronic music. Librarian: those would be under “rock”. Me: What about world music, like Ravi Shankar (classical Indian)? Librarian: check jazz

Fuck me. No wonder the rock and jazz sections are so huge and there’s little else. Picking through it would be unsurmountable and the web DB likely has the same sloppy genre problem. I suspect what has happened is young ppl just don’t do libraries much and they probably use Spotify or similar online surveillance system for music. In fact I rarely even see people browsing the music these days. So the library organisation just did not keep up genres and no one noticed because they are online. So again, like use case 1 it would be useful to find the intersection between a list of titles of interest and the library DB.

I have to wonder if the /real/ problem is that the library thinks I would be the sole user of the exported DB. I can understand resistence to doing a significant amount of work for just one person. But I would expect many people to have search needs that these GUI webforms cannot handle, no? And from there it would be the subset of those people who know SQL.

I’ve noticed that libraries sometimes have board games, but I have never seen video games. The main purpose of libraries is to give the public access to culture. So music, movies and TV shows can be borrowed as optical discs. But why not video games?

I suppose we might figure that some parents would worry that they make an effort to get their kids into the library then games win a competition with education and literature.

But as an adult, I seem to be missing out on a significant bit of culture by being out of touch with recent video games. I’m not going to pay the price of buying gaming systems and games just to get some one-off experiences. I would like to experience a game for 1 week then move on to the next.

I have avoided BDs up until now because I boycott Sony. I grabbed a blu-ray player dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market b/c it was missing parts. I scrounged the needed parts so now I can watch BDs.

I obviously will not be buying an BDs since I boycott Sony. But what happens when I borrow a BD from a public library? Has Sony already been fully compensated by the time the disc goes on the shelf? Or does Sony get compensated somehow on a per-borrow basis?

Media access will be dropped from public libraries. Some politician decided that everyone has Internet with streaming subscriptions.

Or they figured it’s okay to marginalise those who do not. They assumed no one has a problem with patronising shitty surveillance capitalists like Netflix and Amazon.

IIUC, the only possible ways to watch movies in Belgium without feeding corporate databases is:

• buying CDs/DVDs with cash
• theaters (cash paid tickets)
• the high seas (☠)
• broadcast TV (does that exist in Brussels? My hand-held dvb-t player finds no signals to tune)

Only two of those options serves the poor. One is illegal and the other is content-constrained. And still out of reach for anyone who can’t afford Internet at home.

UPDATE

When Médiathéque closes, it does not mean the media goes away. Some libraries will continue with media by managing themselves without the Médiathéque parent.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/37371338

The question can be broken into two parts:

1. would people use it?
2. is it appropriate for a library to have a media room?

I have no TV and I suspect with so many people subscribing to streaming services lately as their sole source (from surveillance capitalists), probably not many people even have antennas to pick up local broadcast TV anymore. Is that a safe assumption?

A couple years ago I setup a MythTV for someone. Their local broadcasts were completely different from what I recall from decades past-- mostly educational (documentaries and how-to shows) and mostly commercial-free. It seemed to be largely fed by tax-funded public broadcast service. It used to be rife with commercials but commercial interests seem to have abandoned it.

Where I live now, I am offline and also lack equipment to see what’s broadcast locally. Not sure it’s justified to buy gear just to see what there is. And I have never seen what free satellite signals are like anywhere.

On the one hand, I could see it turning into an entertainment/cinema type of space with people bringing in popcorn.. which is perhaps a deviation from the library’s purpose. OTOH, it could be information focused to give access to locally aired educational broadcasts and to (perhaps more importantly) show people what content exists locally and to experience MythTV. Library users could even schedule shows to be recorded for them (as the library is not open 24/7). The MythTV PCs would of course be running Linux, which would be a covert way to promote the escape from proprietary OSs.

As I ask myself whether this is all crazy talk, a local library has Arduinos for people to experiment with.. which has nothing to do with books or media.

A parallel mission could be to get the library to run an Invideous instance to try to liberate people from Google’s stranglehold and their ads. Google would probably block the library’s instance but the blockade would then serve to inform people about Google’s politics. I guess the question is whether Invidious is too much in the legal gray area for libraries to seriously consider.

We are living through a period of profound uncertainty and systemic challenge—where erasure of truth and history is not only possible, but actively underway.

As a librarian, I bear witness not only to the crisis but to the opportunity: History is protected by those who collect, preserve, and share the facts, and the archive becomes a battleground where every saved photograph, flyer, email, playlist, program, and story is an act of resistance.