Ethics Poll

[melannen]

If you checked out a library book of crochet patterns, and it was translated from Danish to American and therefore once every ten pages or so gets its single crochet and double crochet and treble crochet mixed up, is it ethical to write the corrections into the book for the next person to use the library book, once you are 100% sure you have it right?

Asking because reasons.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Ethical, yes. Acceptable under library policy? Not convinced.

[melannen]

Luckily(?) I am the employee who gets to interpret the policy at the library in question! :D

[superborb]

In /that/ case, definitely yes

[melannen]

I do generally ask for a second opinion if it's a book I already know I'm going to take home if it gets withdrawn for condition, just to keep myself honest, but I don't think anyone at my location would damage out an otherwise good-condition book for something like a very small number of neatly written corrections to a pattern.

[azurelunatic]

Yes.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Wow. Here I was just thinking it would be ethical to insert but not affix a correction sheet.

Librarian powers Activate! (How is your handwriting? And I do mean your lettering, because I'm sure you will be printing, like Steve being kind to SHIELD interns aka the under 30s.)

[melannen]

A non-affixed correction sheet would probably not be persistent enough to be worth it (we generally just pull out and trash any loose papers with a book, unless it's, like, cash, and there would be no way to mark that one as important) but it would definitely be less ethically questionable.

[silveradept]

Generally speaking, the more marginalia something has, the more likely it's going to be weeded. So if this book is one of a hundred possible books, and it's not a standout for being either good or terrible, if the amount of corrections are small as a total volume of the book, you can probably get away with correcting it and having the book stay on the shelf. If the book is terrible, or the corrections have to happen every other page, you can correct it, sure, but that's only going to hasten its removal from the library shelves when someone with weeding authority has a look at it. (In the generic, public library sense. In a special library context, or if you are the sole person with weeding authority over that section, then things may have different rules.)

I might also check and see if there's an updated version or a version with a better translation available, and request that one get bought so that the old, bad, mistranslated one goes away. Possibly faster if it also has marginalia corrections in it.

But if it's the only translation, and it's going to be a really popular or foundation kind of book, then the trade-off is between a correct pattern and a gone library book.

[melannen]

This is a fairly new book, less than three years and good condition, but most nonfiction books have a <5 year lifespan at this library regardless of condition because of the way we do weeding, so it would be at most a couple more years either way.

It's interesting that a LOT of crochet books in particular lately seem to be translated, either from Europe or Japan, and usually there's at least a few issues with the patterns that can be pretty clearly put down to translation issues. I think it's the same one or two publishing houses bringing them over. So I doubt there's going to be any other translation. They're generally really well-produced books with interesting patterns, and if it had huge numbers of mistakes I would be pushing for it to just go from the collection anyway, but it's just these occasional ones and it's the usual number for this kind of book.

It's interesting that some people are like "definitely yes!" and other people are like "...well, library policy..." I wonder if it's a yarn culture thing.

I don't know how closely other libraries do condition checks, but the ones where I've worked, weeding solely for damage is mostly up to the people who handle check-ins, and they're only going to notice if it's dramatic damage, they're not going to check individual pages for small marks. Nobody's going to look more closely unless it's already under consideration for weeding for other reasons.

[silveradept]

Then it certainly sounds like the library has already gotten their money's worth out of the book and it should be corrected to being accurate for the remainder of its life. And maybe contacting the company that does these and asking nicely if they could have a bit more care with their translation.

[lannamichaels]

Yes, in pencil, in the margin.

[alatefeline]

Yes. But in pencil, mayhap. Or on a little slip of lightweight paper tucked in as needed.

[edenfalling]

Yes, that's ethical; it makes the book more usable for any future readers. (But maybe in pencil, because it's still a library book?)

[marginaliana]

I agree with the above comments to do it in pencil. And - I have faith you know how to do this - make it look as matter-of-fact as possible. Like you're marking a typo very quickly.

[melannen]

Yep, it would basically be delete-and-insert marks on a couple of dc's with 'sc' or 'tr'. And yet what a difference to the pattern making sense! I've got at least one secondhand crochet book that has similar marks from somebody else.

[conuly]

Not just ethical, but mandatory.

[sylvaine]

As someone also working at a public library but in Germany, I'm pretty sure we *have* books we have fixed like this. I see zero reason why this shouldn't be ethical. But I'm not at all precious about the supposed sanctity of books, anyway!

[genarti]

As someone who does yarncraft (knitting rather than crochet, but still) I'm on the "not just ethical but emphatically encouraged!" side. For the library side of things, however, I defer to others. But I do know that if I took that book out of the library, I would be deeply grateful to whatever previous person had corrected the errors so that I didn't have to redo that work for each one I ran into.

[eleanorjane]

I tend to think it's not just neutral, but actively ethical to make it more useful. The value of a book like this is in the utility of the information it contains, so you're definitely making the book better by doing this.

[kathmandu]

I might add a note to the item record, so the notes are known as corrections. If that's compatible with how your library does it.