Death of the physical library

The disappearance of libraries, to leave us all dependent on our own resources and on the fragile information highways,looks like the beginning of the end of individuals gaining understanding of physical and other processes.

When combined with poor education systems, the outcome must be ignorance.

In the event of global catastrophe we won't even know what we need to learn.

I fully agree that physical aspects of libraries cannot be fully replicated with databases and searches.

Discovery indeed comes in many forms, sometimes by proximity, other times by serendipity, size of the book, even what sits on the recently returned racks.

In a similar sense, I mourn the death of printed phone books and yellow pages. And printed encyclopedia, dictionaries and atlases.

The loss of the physical formats removed forever, extremely interesting aspects of browsing and learning from these sources.

I spent many hours in and benefitted much from physical libraries in the 1970s. But let’s not forget how limited libraries were then: research libraries were usually accessible only to people with the proper affiliations or qualifications, and many kept most of their materials in closed stacks; public libraries could be browsed only by people in the same physical location; and in any case you had no chance of stumbling upon a book if it had been checked out, lost, or stolen.

Later, when I no longer had a university affiliation and was not living in an English-speaking country, I missed those libraries terribly. The arrival of the Internet felt like an intellectual reawakening to me; I am especially grateful now for the efforts of the Internet Archive.

Other than out of nostalgia, I have no desire to use physical libraries again.

My personal home library is certainly going the other way.

For slow-moving or completely crystallized knowledge, like what you get in OReilly-type general manuals and textbooks, nothing beats a dead tree.

Even for a complicated novel, I really prefer paper nowadays. And it can never get censored post-purchase.

I know this isn't the thrust of the article, but I just visited the Oslo Public Library (from the US), and holy shit, my eyes have been opened to what a modern physical library can be. So many people were using it. Amazing place worth looking up.

As much as I like physical books, academic libraries are intended to serve informational, educational, and creative needs regardless of medium (and public libraries add social, civic, and practical needs). The discovery aspect of physical libraries is valuable, but running a library requires balancing a lot of different communities and needs. Sometimes that means removing shelving. I don’t have the context to weigh in on the changes the author mentions, but I dislike the implication that repurposing shelving space is always bad.

I don’t understand why the authors valid complaints about libraries being removed randomly inserts complaints about a field he doesn’t like in incredibly juvenile tones.

The author makes a great case for the serendipity of stumbling across information that you didn’t even know you didn’t know—but not that field! That’s a field for children how dare it defile his libraries with its existence. He doesn’t care about it, so why on earth would anyone?

He betrayed his entire thesis.

Libraries are too associated with physical books. They might just need a new name. A Community Education Center could potentially cover it. There aren't enough of these - public buildings where people can go and access publicly available resources to better themselves. If you frame it that way, it's much more flexible and irrefutably valuable.

The UK is leading the way!

For those who love libraries here is a fantastic one to visit:

https://www.litandphil.org.uk/

Based in Newcastle upon-Tyne, UK it is highly wonderful. If you are ever in the area and love books simply pop in!

What I see here amounts to an organizational problem. The Dewey decimal system isn't limited to physical copies. An application that has all that organizational information on all of libgen for example would be much more powerful than at any one library. The only thing I see that is missing is randomly walking by a shelf and finding a book that catches your fancy, a side effect of the way in which the information is accessed, and we have other ways of stumbling on books, I do it all the time on the internet. My personal library is almost entirely made up of books I found like that.

While alphabetically indexed lists of http links would most certainly be prone to rot, other modes of information storage can be more resilient than physical libraries, and easier to access.

Still have to find a monitor large, affordable and with enough resolution to replicate two books from an encyclopedia open and ready on a desk.

Also the internet can not replicate the social possibilities enabled by physical proximity.

I was interested in the authors views until it became clear this was an excuse to publish his 1950s attitude towards gay and non-western people.

They should have libraries full of e-readers that has unlimited access to some ebook providers

This is an article with a good point: what happens to library selections over time as business needs / logistical hassles make it necessary to make cuts? I liked the parallel of the DD system to the KNN algo.

But that is unfortunately overshadowed by the out-of-left-field dismissive and insulting comment about literature in a different field, and about business majors. Frankly, those few sentences overshadow the point that he tried to make: that preservation of knowledge is important. Overshadowed because he made it obvious that this principle applies only to material the author personally considers worthy of preserving.

Taking the author at his word, I have to ask: if representation of Topic X is excessive in a business school's library, why should any space at all be dedicated at all to your pet interests over the needs of paying students?

real-estate these libraries stand on has become so valuable that this is inevitable. putting books to storage prevents the serendipitous discovery of books whilst browsing shelves. i've resigned to that if the online catalog is good.