@Guillotine_Jones @overholt

Much of this applies to a vast number librarians outside the special collections, too.

And unfortunately even to a fair few within special collections.

I once flew to another country to see a book. The desk assistant brought it out to me, and at first glance it was obviously a different copy. I told the assistant this, and she was mystified. How could I be so sure so soon? Because it had a bookplate postdating the person whose traces I was hoping to find. He'd borrowed it repeatedly over several years, keeping it for months each time. I knew when because he was a hoarder and I'd see his borrowing slips, on the back of which he wrote brief reviews of every book documented.

There was evidence in the card catalogue that the copy I wanted had been thrown away because this one was in better condition. So I wasted a flight, accommodation, taxi fares, restaurant food, and several days because someone had not valued the non-print information that I wanted and not bothered to document that in the on-line catalogue in one of those projects where someone says "Let's make the card catalogue digital" and then runs out of resource between making stub entries and filling in the finer details.

I'm going off of this DH project, which looked at the metadata attached to scanned IA items in addition to talking to scanning staff: https://scanninglabor.github.io/IAScanningLabor/discussion.html

I saw these folks present at a conference, and recall them saying the books were being destroyed rather than sent back across the Pacific—but can't find confirmation

i'll take my golden egg now, thank you.

they copy the isbn and metadata
save each scan in some datalake
ocr each scan into another datalake
associate metadata in db with artifacts in lake
sucked into a model
each retraining can reuse as needed

no way they delete the artifacts but also no way they would share