The Books of College Libraries Are Turning into Wallpaper
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
They were in close proximity to other books that you knew to be useful. Example: I might be looking at someone's obscure technical book from the 1870s at the college they worked for ... and nearby might be the world's only remaining copy of a bio written by a friend or colleague that mentions facts found nowhere else.
I won't know ... because neither is shelved any more. The 1870s book is found at archive.org. But not the bio. And the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog.
The rewards of the physical browsing experience are lost in the digital age. No way to assess the damage that's been done by hiding college stacks underground in containers. To assess the effect of moving uncommon books to special collections with infrequent hours and stringent requirements.
I have to wonder about the professionalism of the people who too carelessly make the decision to overturn systems evolved by centuries of scholarship.
While I certainly appreciate the digital modernization of academic work (and in many ways even I am amazed that we wrote papers by hand, on paper, from paper books)... There really is something about just browsing shelves that exposes you to more options that I miss when researching online.
Surprisingly, you can duplicate a lot of the "see similar stuff" functionality through Amazon's recommendation engine (for new books anyway). The other things people have viewed/purchased for any given item are usually quite useful, and aren't limited by physical proximity, e.g. the Band of Brothers DVD listing on Amazon includes in its related items many nonfiction books, which you would never get from the strict categorization scheme in the library.
I wish online library catalogs would do a better job of replicating this recommendation/similarity engine, because on Amazon things tend to be limited just to things that are still in print and for sale.
I have to confess that I still go to my local Barnes and Noble to browse the tech section to see what's new and to browse titles I haven't heard of. I can't do the same at the public library because there are a lot of old books about obsolete tech right next to the (few) brand new books.
The good thing about Barnes and Noble is that their selection is human curated because of their physical constraints. On Amazon, I can spend an entire week browsing the "Customers also Purchased" section.
I've resorted to taking photos of the interesting shelves so I don't have to go there as often.
But what if instead you filled the result set with the top result from each topic, and then let the user select a topic to drill down, you could have a "more like this" link for each result item and topic. Wouldnt that more resemble what we like about the library? We want to find the right shelf, then browse a while.
Why?
I think it's pretty obviously nonsense to claim you can't teach yourself programming at all using the books available right now.
Last time I got a ZX-spectrum coding book that a friend on a forum wrote. Before that some obscure manga comic book. That one took a few months because they had a hard time to find it, it was long out of print.
They are very open to suggestions even of odd books and very curious librarians, both young and old.
I also never said you couldn't text yourself programming by going to the library, but most of the people who would go to the library to learn coding don't have home computers themselves, I'd wager, and need to use online IDEs which would mean having access to the internet with more up to date resources typically than what's available on the shelves.
In another comment on this topic I brought up that I personally use a blended approach of books for the why's and online for the how's. There's a ton of great coding books out there. Many unfortunately don't make it into library collections and the ones that do typically require either ordering via a hold or just buying outright beggar the library doesn't have it. I'm a huge library lover, you won't find me cheering for their demise.
You literally said it was 'impossible today'.
> I taught myself programming by browsing the 000 section as a kid, something that would be impossible today
That system can have its own ways of breaking down - consider trying to curate a collection of books on a topic you don't know about - but it gets at the limits of our current algorithmic approaches. Our systems don't know the content itself, just the feedback various others give about the content.
The bandwidth of a shelf is incredibly high. You can review hundreds of titles per minute. Along with the actual title and author data printed on the spine, the book’s condition gives you some hints about its age and popularity. There’s no friction if you want to pause and examine one title more deeply, and you can trivially pick up where you left off once done.
The physical arrangement of books also papers over any deficiencies in the metadata, so that you’ll probably find something relevant, even if its title and keywords don’t match your initial expectations.
It’s obviously not perfect: you need to compare books yourself, since reviews or circulation data are rarely available, especially right at the shelf. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen a web interface that was even close to as efficient as a library or bookshop.
This is what I miss about technical bookstores. Serendipity. And computers can't yet duplicate that, since what is serendipitous often has nothing to do with me until I find it.
I found Calendrical Calculations on the shelf at SoftPro books in Centennial, while just generally browsing. I have never before, and never since, bought a book about calendar systems. What I like most about it was the historical treatment of different calendar systems and definitions of "day." https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calendrical+calculations&t=lm&ia=p...
Had I bought it at Amazon, I'd see all sorts of time and calendar books that I have no interest in. But, I never would have found it to begin with.
Sometimes you have to be open to a less direct search style, or just pick a new word. For example trying it now, the word was "corrod" (I believe it's meant to be the Welsh plural of "cor", which is "dwarf or pygmy") and nothing was found so I might just move on to a new word. But something in Amazon's systems must be interpreting it as "corrode" and so one of the suggested sub-categories I noticed on the side is "Steampunk fiction". Here's an entire genre I didn't realize existed and would be unlikely to find or notice if it even exists at a library or book store. Now I can go look at random books in that category, or google for "best steampunk fiction" to get some good suggestions for entry points.
You have to create the circumstances for serendipity.
The proximity was nice, but mostly proximity of same category topics. That is mostly replaceable if someone makes a search engine on books, perhaps with a Dewey decimal number mode.
Also consider that developed cities and thus universities are becoming more and more crowded. Study space is at a premium. The unused stacks should be kept mostly as wall dividers between new study cubicles, so that the new students have enough places to study. I think overall the utility increase is much higher
I can't think of any technical reason why an online card catalog cannot have proximity, too. In fact, if the card catalog was literally just scanned in, you'd have the same proximity.
A killer app for VR would be to browse Amazon's bookstore virtually. Imagine walking through the shelves of the biggest library in the world, pulling out a book, and reading it (even if it's just a snippet). Add multiplayer capabilities so you can interact with other library patrons and you've got perhaps the most addictive "game" ever created. This could be extended to create virtual product libraries. I would be really surprised if someone isn't working on this yet.
Sure, it's only a small part of the web and not primary references. But it is a working example.
They were great at sound dampening. Studying in the library was great because if there was a row of books between you and the people working on a group project. The books muffled the sound enough to concentrate.
I don't mind losing physical books in the library, as long as we can keep the same ambiance.
I am extremely worried that libraries are now replacing physical books by digital representations. If this is going to continue, there will be a point where the slightest global catastrophe will wipe out most of the knowledge of the past 2000 years.
If you'd make a printed version of wikipedia you'd also need a transformation to turn links into references to other pages.
In the dead tree form, my college library was a federal depository library. There was a treasure trove of data in there, and at 100 other colleges. Much harder to erase.
In my professional life, digitization IMO has produced lots of data, but the practices around it default to “destroy”, thanks to interia and ediscovery. With paper records, keeping stuff around was the natural state.
Not saying that digital storage is perfect, of course, but asserting that a physical copy of a book in a library somewhere is safer and more accessible than bytes on the internet is ridiculous.
We can read manuscripts and tablets produced millennia ago, but are already running into difficulties accessing digital media published in our lifetimes.
E.g. Compare the Domesday Book with the Domesday project:
Ha? What about all the stories of public libraries and bookstores closing down?
These seems like a long article that avoids the obvious - people don't use books because eBooks and computers are simply more convenient.
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/ebook-sales-decline...
What I fear may go away is the long form books offer. When exploring a new topic, articles are often too dense. In books, authors can establish the background, help create a shared vocabulary, and motivate what is often so condensed in a research article.
The discussion revealed that people don't learn in shool how to read and study with books anymore. Of course you don't remember much if you read the book from start to end. E-readers may share the blame. It's very hard and slow to study with e-book. If you spend hours studyin, you really need a book written into a paper.
Maybe one day computers and digital readers will actually be good enough to replace books. They're not even close today. The tech's just great.
For example, I use Foxit for looking at PDFs. Maddeningly, I cannot view two PDFs at the same time in different windows. There is no technical reason for this limitation, in fact, the limitation was deliberately programmed into it.
I'm pretty sure the people who program PDF readers have never actually used them. (There are a number of bizarre and trivial limitations to them that are trivially fixed. For example, many readers can only remember the last page read for the most recently read PDF. So if you open another PDF, your earlier place vanishes.)
I use a (reasonably good) Android reader which affords metadata presentation and editing, but lacks an "author" field.
Long since reported. Not fixed.
I remember on PDF reader on a tablet which would remember your last read position only in the last 3 PDFs you opened. Open another one, and one gets pushed off the bed. I simply cannot understand the train of thought that concluded that 3 was the lucky number here.
Another advantage for me of physical books (etc) is that you have something like "tactile memory." What I mean by this is that very often, I can find where something was mentioned basically by how the book feels when its opened (e.g., how thick the pages are in each hand). A similar thing happens with shelves of books.
This is pretty hard to replicate with better tech.
Just had a scan of Glasgow and Edinburgh University's library membership pages. The general public can access the libraries but how and what you're permitted to access can vary between institutions.
The experience of going to the library now compared to 30 years ago when I was a kid is totally different. Then it was a quiet place with books, catalogues, a reading table, and maybe a computer or two. Now it is a social meeting place.
(What I do wonder is, what were the social meeting places of 30 years ago? Why is there a need for them now?)
Anyway, in my experience with university libraries, unless you know what you're doing research-wise, these libraries are not the most accessible for the outsider. There is a lot of information to wade through, and if you're unlucky, you have to order books you want from the archive/warehouse anyway, which can take from a couple of hours to a couple of days. Unless you can go to the library every day, you will have to plan your visit, search and request the books and materials you think you want beforehand, and hope for the best.
How I miss searching for hours or days in libraries and archives!
Check out the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
[EDIT] and that's just when you can find out that there is something more to find. How many times does the Internet not even know—or if it does, not in any way you could reasonably find—what it doesn't know? I have a whole book that's just a list of works by and about T.E. Lawrence. Books, articles, introductions, collections, papers. It's the length of a normal book, and contains almost nothing but a list of works. It's a book-length bibliography. That's one guy. Granted, famous, but there are tons of people as or more famous/important as/than him. Plus all those topics that aren't single people. Buildings, movements, art works, events. The Web's smaller than one might hope.
These two are not allowed with digital academic sources.
There's a huge demand for both types of spaces, and said demand is not interchangeable.
And anyway, cafes are way too loud.
I can't tell you how many of what would eventually be cultural and historic artifacts I've seen just disappear on a failed disk somewhere.
Nowadays, most students have a library of pirated PDFs, meaning they have the information on hand where they need it and with no need to return it or find it already borrowed in the college library. Most colleges will give you access to online databases of journals, so they aren't a draw either.
The other problem encountered was that of QC. At least in my institution more substantial books were always in short supply, as they'd never have more than 5-6 copies of a single book, so you'd arrive at the computing section and find... "Java 2 for Dummies". Or "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours". Books that might have been fine to self-learners (when they were not significantly outdated), but nothing that wouldn't be covered in a textbook and nothing more substantial.
Probably this is a disconnect between the people running the library and the lecturers, but the attitude of the library was "Yes, we have software development books. What do you mean 15 years is out of date? The psychology books have been there since the 70s. And our figures show that more students have taken out 'Java 2 for Dummies' than 'Design Patterns' or 'The Pragmatic Programmer', so we don't need more copies."
But those two factors, the greater accessibility of pirated PDFs and blogs (and for some of the slightly more recent students, Stack Overflow), and the lacking quality of what was probably available on the shelves at any given point you chose to look meant that the library was definitely way more useful as a study space than for the contents of the shelves for the other students and myself during my degree.
Graduate students, and some faculty members, are also "today's kids", depending on your vantage point.
There weren't many people that did this, so in my senior year the library decided that the books were a poor use of space, and started tagging books that hadn't been checked out for N years for removal (just with a sticker, I had to ask to find out what the tags were for). Then they started to remove the books, so the 10 aisle section (each aisle with 20 or so full size bookshelves) on physics got reduced down to ~3 shelves. I asked the librarians where they had gone, and they assured me that I shouldn't be concerned because they had just gone to storage, so they could still be requested if needed. But this change meant that instead of just quickly checking several relativity books (indices are great) when I needed further explanation, I would have to search in the catalog and individually request them, which took several orders of magnitude longer.
I have never seen a catalog with an interface that allows replicating the experience of walking through the stacks. Most interfaces allow you to find 1) popular books in some field which are almost always from the last decade or so and reflect what is currently hype, or 2) books with a particular title or author that you are already looking for.
I'm reminded of a study on the dynamics and distribution of academic citations over the past century. I can't seem to find it at the moment (maybe it was referenced in one of Carr's works), but I think the gist is that the breadth of citations has reduced substantially in the last decades. Rather than citing many different papers from many different times, papers have begun to cite that same most-cited papers over and over again (that show up first in the search results), if I recall correctly. Reading a single pdf excerpted from a journal is a very different experience from reading the same article in the physical journal, because in the second you end up flipping past all the other articles which may catch your eye. In the same vein, reading a single ebook (or even requested book from storage) is a very different experience that finding it on the shelf and maybe running across several other awesome books on the way.
It makes me very sad that centuries of knowledge from the best minds of humanity are getting shoved in storage, accessible only via search terms and the like, and replaced by couches where students can sit and browse Facebook/reddit/etc and occasionally work on schoolwork.
This is a tragedy, and the worst of it is that the people it's happening to don't realize what's going on.
Journal access is also a pain - digital subscriptions are amazing, but my University is not subscribed to some journals I need access to, or they only have a subscription for papers after a certain date, which is when they stopped buying the print copy.