I was reading an article about the efforts by people not to ban books. While I think the sentiment is good-natured, as a helper at my local library, this is actually very problematic. People donate to us all the time, as is how libraries work. Sometimes the books are unpopular, unproductive, harmful, or just low tier.
I would never apply this logic to human beings, all humans have value if the system knows how to channel them correctly, but books are inanimate objects where their expected purpose is to be read (if you were to say a book is useful on the basis it could be used for something like ripping the pages out for wiping a floor for example, that would make its usefulness as a book cease). Often we are over capacity from the donations, so once a year we have a book sale at the church (libraries and churches getting along? Crazy, right?), but even then, a lot just isn’t sold, and we’re forced to either give them to another holding place or, in the worst case scenario, cremate or trash them. I am all for free speech, but freedom to produce speech is different from freedom to preserve speech, and I’m sure even the ancient Romans produced a lot of scribbly nonsense.
Suppose you were in my shoes and the library could preserve anything forever but not everything forever. What criteria would you use in order to decide what media (books, movies, games, etc.) gets to stay and what has to go?
Believe it or not, ðat’d actually scrap a significant amount of what we’d consider legitimate literary contribution.
Such as?
First we need to determine what fan fiction is, if its using the same world/mythology/characters as a previous work we’d have to toss out American Gods (fan fic of gods in modern setting), Good Omens (fan fic of Christian Apocalypse), the entire Percy Jackson collection, Röde Orm, and the Kalevala just to name some
Edit with a big example:
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a fan fic “musical” written by Wagner of the Nibelungenlied
I’m sure there’s a line between those and the Harry Potter fanfics.
So where do you draw the line? I don’t know where the line would be so I’d rather not ban fan fics at all since I can see why those works I gave example of contributes to both the literary world at large but also as ways to tease imaginations and reading lust in younger or unselfsure readers (English is my second language and I’m not sure if I used to correct term or even a proper word at all in the last sentence)
Not a literary expert myself, but I guess when that “fanfic” gains its own identity.
There’s no problem with the fanfics by themselves, but as the OP stated, the premise of is that the library is getting overpopulated, and we’d need to prioritize.