My Nerd Cup Runneth Over

So it was part of my job to both coordinate donations—communicating with the donor, scheduling drop-off times, providing donation guidelines, etc.—and also to evaluate donated books and decide which we’d add to our collection versus which we’d give away or recycle. And I can tell you from years of scrounging through hundreds (if not thousands) of boxes of donated books, the main reasons many libraries are moving away from accepting book donations is:

Too many people treat libraries like dumpsters by giving us books that are badly damaged/falling apart, which we can't use in our collections and increasingly can’t repair (the decline of book mending skills in tech services is a whole other post), so then staff are left to deal with what is essentially trash.

Even if the donated books are in decent condition, they are often titles that likely won't circulate—think, like, 30-year-old textbooks with outdated science, or self-published car-buying guides riddled with spelling errors, etc.—and therefore we can't justify the shelf space they'd take up.

Many libraries are experiencing staff shortages due to budget cuts (particularly in the US, because our current federal administration is gunning for libraries, museums, and education at large), which means that we have fewer staff taking on more responsibilities to keep things running, and we simply can’t prioritize spending hours/days sifting through donation boxes full of largely unusable books.

Here’s a real life example! My library once received a donation of 100+ boxes of books, which was then handed off to me to evaluate and process. In this particular instance, my boss (director of the library) had been communicating with the donor and had done some vetting of the intended donation. The donor told my boss they were donating 60 boxes of book. Sixty. But when I showed up to work the morning after the drop-off, there was an enormous wall of well over 100 boxes. And as I started opening the boxes and sorting through their contents… I quickly realized that a significant percent of the donation was not going to be usable.

There were entire boxes of personal journals (I would burn my journals before letting anyone see them, but this person really said "sure, give them to the library!"), and boxes of 80s VHS workout tapes, and boxes full of receipts/financial documents, and boxes full of empty binders and file folders... it was less a book donation and more a delivery of trash the donor didn't want to deal with. At least 70% of that donation had to be thrown out—and you can imagine how frustrating that was after I spent several weeks going through the boxes. All that time and man-power in exchange for maybe 40 useable books. You can see how, after several experiences like this, a library might adopt a no-donations policy.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

Pokemon Day

Somewhere safe- … but why hasn't anyone else arrived…?

What could she say? What could she pray for?

… Anything but to be alone in this world.

I'm afraid they'll become engineers and sign off on bridge designs that collapse - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become medical professionals who don't know what they're doing - and people will die.