Libraries and Well-Being: A Case Study from The New York Public Library
lithub.com
lithub.com
For instance, Georgia Tech recently moved their physical collection to off-campus stacks shared with Emory University, and both the University of South Carolina and Texas A&M University systems are downsizing collections and moving towards an access model reliant on the ILL system. The A&M system has even gone further and largely eliminated tenure for librarians. Other university systems, like the one in my snall state, have started to push checking out ebooks over physical books in various ways, possibly in preparation for more drastic changes like this, or at least so that they can begin downsizing their collections
This doesn't just affect students at universities, since many public institutions have historically offered community borrowing, and often have extremely rare books that simply aren't available otherwise
It's a complicated issue since this phenomenon is driven partly by user demand -- students are reading much less than they used to, and far less in the way of physical books, and university systems are responding to changes in demand. It's still sad to see
There is the answer. It's really hard to justify when usage is so low.
I am not under the illusion that "everything is on the internet". The best information is in books. But it's hard to argue University libraries aren't mostly study areas, and the books are symbolic. I wouldn't be surprised if its budget is already under "alumni outreach".
This is perhaps another symptom of the weird mix of undergrad, with a government research institution attached.
I like reading through the oldest books in the collections and ones related to my field / hobbies, but other than that, I don't know of anyone who actually checks out books from the archives.
They've essentially become glorified quiet lobby areas that off-campus commuters use as a common space between classes.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antili...
I'm sure people would make an argument to the effect that writing that has existed for X years or decades would have already been tapped if it was of any value, and I would respond by saying many publications make little impact on their contemporaries only to be discovered later to have been ahead of their time.
If we start using "engagement" as a metric for the retention of writing, then knowledge will suffer under the tyranny of the majority. Instead I think the most unread books in a library should be celebrated and promoted by the librarians for the sake of having been unread, even if it ends up being kind of funny how bad they are.
> many publications make little impact on their contemporaries only to be discovered later to have been ahead of their time.
I would say this is evidence that books do not represent a "infinitely growing body of human knowledge". Knowledge is only alive in the people using it.
Wow, that is so well written.
It summarizes many of the problems of today and the disappointing aspects of technological effort and its applications.
Library books solely as interior design is still better than 99% of the decorative architecture campuses are covered in that use up orders of magnitude more space.
In Europe it is legal to scan library books and use the contents with ML, per EU directive.
One person had the books he'd authored lined up on his shelf.
Sadly, I rarely am able to read the titles on the spines. A bit too out of focus.
There's a great pic of Werner von Braun in his office, with the inevitable bookshelf behind him. I was able to read some of the titles, and looked them up. Classic rocket books! The ultimate nerd bookshelf.
I wonder what is on Elon's bookshelf!
There are rental bookshelves available for decorative or studio purposes actually, which are purely put together to give the impression of erudition. When doing scholarly photoshoots, posing in front of the office bookshelf is a common choice.
Elons brand isn’t really being a historian or an academic guy. I don’t think he reads and I don’t think he pretends to. Just focus on the projects.
I've read that he's read "Rocketeers" by Belfiore, along with "Rocket Propulsion Elements" and "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics".
I have all three. The latter two are very non-trivial.
Musk is extremely well informed about technology. The idea that he doesn't read is not compelling.
Yes. That’s different than reading. I’m not ascribing moral value either way.
I recall debating a historical point with a person who would send me cites in the form of TikTok clips. Coincidentally, I have two entire books on the subject, by two accomplished historians. Both books demolished all of his points.
Just for fun, compare a transcript of the movie "Oppenheimer" with the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". You're looking at a transcript of the movie of a few pages vs a 750 page small print tome. There's no way "Oppenheimer" makes one well informed about the Manhattan Project.
That's fine. For good study areas, you end up with a lot of dead space, anyway, which might as well be filled with books.
What sucks is libraries that are both passively and actively hostile to people trying to read and study.
The Library of Congress is an amazing free resource with a significant fraction of what's ever been published. They too seem to be pushing more and more off-site, but not to the extent that university libraries are. I can find a lot of rare books there that I would not have access to otherwise, and I've also used their technical reports collection extensively.
I'm not sure what I would do if the various research libraries I frequent were to reduce services or close. I've been saving a ton of PDF files over the years and I guess I could make do with what I have.
I personally think it is horrible that many universities are selling their physical collections, but I just want to post some reasoning as to why there is a shift in usage. As a researcher, I think that being able to get an immediate answer is often great, but the problem is that it prevents you from exploring the information more deeply and broadly. It gives you a false sense of finality that doesn't require you to question what you are reading more closely or more broadly by examining many sources (like the neighboring books on a library shelf). And when you are doing deep research, that really is a skill you need.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
Eg, UW had microfiche and book collections of many periodicals going back to the 1800s, which I haven’t seen a digitized version of. By contrast, I often have trouble finding a digital article I know I read a few years ago.
Similarly, specialty libraries like the math library that had many out of print books — many of which were relevant to my own work.
I've even had the same experience with you even it comes to microfiche in university collections. For my PhD, I had to request a lot of older government research reports from the 1970s and 1980s. None of it was online, but a lot of it was available on microfiche. I'd request a box with a range of report numbers, wait a few days for it to come to the reading room, and then go into the reading room to read and maybe scan the report if it was relevant. And often the specific report I wanted would not be in the box when I got there, since I only knew what ranges of reports were available, not which individual report was available. I'll note again that this is a much slower process, taking days to find one relevant bit of information, but that doesn't mean it is not valuable or necessary. I've found a lot of interesting information that way, and none of it was available online at the time.
Yup. Having the last word is to post an excerpt from a book. Wikipedia doesn't hold a candle to a real history book.
>---Anne Herbert, _The Next Whole Earth Catalog_ (1980), p 331.
I don't particularly have a problem with public funds going toward that, but I don't think library staff are trained or signed up for that work, or that libraries are an appropriate and cost effective way to help these people.
I don't think libraries should be sacred. They're nice to look at and nostalgic, but are increasingly anachronisms. Specialized facilities for higher education and historical research I can see still having some use, perhaps small school libraries, but the average public library not so much. They use a lot of space, a lot of floor space for books, requires staffing.
Seems to help somewhat.
IMO the mindset that everything everything has to be optimized to not use up “too much floor space” if it presumably doesn’t return enough measurable value is the kind of mentality that causes societal issues that we need nice libraries to counteract.
Yeah, and I'm saying they shouldn't be.
> They make people feel better about their life and the world based on some seemingly rigorous survey results.
> IMO the mindset that everything everything has to be optimized to not use up “too much floor space” if it presumably doesn’t return enough measurable value is the kind of mentality that causes societal issues that we need nice libraries to counteract.
It's not that it's too much floor space, it's that it costs too much for the benefit it provides. With government expenditure in western countries approaching or even exceeding 40% of GDP with no sign of slowing and social problems that seem to be worse than ever in some cases, I would say that efficiency of government service delivery is critically important. It's not even hyper optimizing, just basic optimizing would be nice.
Libraries taking up too much floor space doesn't mean much, since so does anything else. At the same time, they and all other things also take up too little floor space, since "taking up floor space" by itself doesn't really mean anything I can discern. Libraries are unique, and valuable; what other unique and valuable thing does their existence prevent?
To measure things you need at least two things. Maybe even three: an object to measure, a scale or another object to compare to, and some sort of heuristic as to what the result might mean (for you). It's pointless to say that it doesn't satisfy your standards of "usefulness" or what exactly your concern is, if you don't share those standards.
It costs way less than Facebook or a server farm full of GPT instances and provides more benefit and less harm. Our society has really warped the notion of what appropriate costs and benefits are.
What you wrote is that a library "costs too much for the benefit it provides". What I'm saying is that there are many other things we currently pay more for that provide even less benefit, so in relative terms libraries are quite far down the list of expenses to be worried about.
Anyway the topic is libraries. I did not say that no other things should be examined for their value for money, I was just talking about libraries. And the government sure should make good spending decisions on everything they spend money on! What kind of suggestion is that??
It feels a little bit like hyper optimizing. According to [0], the US spent $14.6B on libraries in 2020. The vast majority of that was from local municipalities, with state funding accounting for ~$1B and federal funding only $80M (disclaimer: I have not put any effort into verifying these numbers). It seems like our time would be better spent optimizing larger, more expensive programs before really pushing to make improvements here.
At the federal level, pretty much anything else, since it’s already not really spending any money on libraries, relatively speaking.
At the state/local level, it’s harder to say since there are many more administrative units involved, each with their own budget and operating model. (This also makes it hard to optimize in general, since you’d have to apply the optimizations independently across many polities.)
If I use my city as an example, library funding is 5% of the city budget. The state provides no funding to any library, so this is the entire amount the libraries get. It’s the second smallest spend by category as the city tracks such things —- though there is an “other” category that represents 10% of the budget. The bulk of the spending is on police (23%), fire (17%), and public works (11%). Obviously these are also critical services (basically everything in the city budget is!), so it’s not easy to do cost cutting there either, but there’s proportionally more room for improvement.
> I don't think libraries should be sacred.
An old business partner used to ask, “what dies first, democracy or the library?”
Libraries represent democracy and the free flow of information. Their analog nature makes them much harder to turn off or alter than a website. It’s no surprise the new admin called book bans “hoaxes” so they can continue. I fear we may learn the answer to my friend’s question.
I also found out last year they have an extensive manga collection (multiple shelves in both the teen and adult areas), so I've been taking advantage of that to read thousands of dollars worth of manga for free (I've bought copies of a few favorites afterwards, though).
Those machines will be obsolete before they have been used the equivalent of 2 days.
My late art foundation director friend would occasionally write art theory and critiques for books and curatorial pieces, and I remember wondering how he was able to get across so many references and so much material to write so eloquently?
Of course he'd been working since the 70's, but it wasn't till I set foot in a public library that I was like "Aha... surely this was his secret weapon.".
Online access has so many advantages, but I can't shake the feeling that it traps me within the web of my existing associations.
In addition to membership libraries, Benjamin Franklin also played a role in the development of the first lending library. In 1790, Franklin donated a collection of books to a Massachusetts town that named itself after him. Though the town asked Franklin to donate a bell, he determined that "sense" was more important than "sound." Franklin residents voted for those donated books to be freely available for town members, creating the nation's first public library.
[1] https://dp.la/exhibitions/history-us-public-libraries/beginn...
He credited reading books for his success and passed the privilege to everyone else.
When my family moved to the rural county in Virginia my father chose to retire to, the county "library" was a metal carrel of used paperbacks in one corner of the basement of the old Courthouse, open two afternoons a week, staffed by a volunteers from a local ladies auxiliary --- it took almost 3 decades of fund-raising before they were able to build a library on a small plot of land donated by the local school system.
Here's a list of all Carnegie Libraries in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Carnegie_libraries_in_...
Here are the lists for the rest of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library#Lists_of_Carn...
Didn't get to the nearby college library until a class trip for my senior paper --- in addition to the research for that, checked out a copy of Knuth's _TeX and METAFONT_ which changed the course of my life.
It's just unfortunate that every public facility becomes an overflow for super-users, instead of addressing their needs directly.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-peopl...
Libraries do naturally arise from the first-sale doctrine here. I think they would not exist in SF but perhaps Walnut Creek etc would have some.
Can you imagine a modern for-profit library?
Pay fees for access. Pay more fees to "skip the queue" for reserving books. Enjoy ads on your mandatory library app AND in your paid-for library space.
Yeeesh. No thanks. A modern public library is a simple reminder that we CAN have good things.
Netflix was still pretty niche in 2009. You’ve got a lot of poor friends? Who were movie buffs?
Blockbuster and other video rental places were basically pay-per-use libraries, but not with an area to consume the media.
I think many private libraries like Mechanics are nonprofits and aren't primarily funded by membership dues, so have little incentive to engage in dark patterns like this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics%27_Institute,_San_...
But SF public library has a couple dozen branches or more?
Personally I've never heard of or been to any commercial library before, perhaps it's really good startup idea with internal coffee shop (library first, cafeteria second).
I've been to coffee and books cafe (basically cafeteria first, library second) in France and normally it's full during the day (close at 7 pm).
As an aside, are there university libraries one can join directly for a fee? I was under the impression they were bundled in with tuition etc. If it’s around $100/month I wouldn’t mind that, but perhaps that is an unachievable target.
There are. Some are more open than others, but it generally comes down to "give $$, get access".
Here's Stanford's page, for example: https://library.stanford.edu/about-stanford-libraries/visit-...:
One thing worth noting, these accesses do not always include access to electronic resources. Access may only be available from computers that are in the library.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics%27_Institute,_San_Fr...
A lovely place
Members can go there, plug in a laptop, and type. Quietly. It's never crowded.
It's a well-curated, library. It's most useful if you want historical information about 19th and early 20th century technology. They have a complete bound set of Popular Mechanics, from the days when it was a serious technical publication. The multi-volume engineering study for the Panama Canal, with drawings, is there. Current offerings are well chosen and updated regularly.
Only 15% of that is spent on books and ebooks.
So perhaps the public libraries are serving most people well enough?
And I wasn't so sure the answer to that could be definitive!
For example, to my knowledge, there's not a single place reasonably convenient in NY Bryant Park library or Stavros Foundation library where I can take video calls. In more suburban cities I frequent, the hours are often 9-5 with a Sunday operating 1-5pm.
It also frustrates me so much that coffee shops (establishments expecting purchases to stay) function more conveniently than libraries as a place I can sit down and work.
Actually, now that I think of it, I've also done at least one video call from the halls of the Stephen A. Schwarzman research branch across the street. Granted, these are not dedicated co-working spaces where you can make any noise you wish, but some calls are possible.
As for Meta's effect on "well-being", that is a question left for the reader.
Eh, probably not.
If I want to survey the effectiveness of Post Office in the era of Internet (email, messenger, etc), I'd definitely interview mainly the visitors to the Post office to check their their purposes, experiences and activities there. For example, you'll probably find someone posting a postcard inside the post office since that someone is probably a visiting tourist.
If you wanted to know what parents think of public schools, would you survey only the parents who currently send their kids there, or would it also be informative to know the opinions of the parents whose children educated elsewhere?
And even if someone has never used X, it doesn't mean they haven't done extensive research about X, before concluding X doesn't meet their quality bar.
Before deciding whether to send my son to an SFUSD school, I had a call with the principal of the school and asked questions specific to my son's situation. Do you think my conclusions are worthless for understanding the quality of the service?
Also, while I get your point, you're in the very unique position of informed non-users. That's a valuable category if you can access it, but it's the most difficult. (How can you determine which library non-attendants have done their research?)
Not useless by any means
"If you're looking to understand the quality of a service, non-users are worthless"
given the choice between somebody who interviewed the principal and a somebody else who's son actually attends, I'd prefer the latter every time. Wouldn't you?
"If you're looking to understand the quality of a service, non-users are essentially worthless."
I'm suggesting that, in absence of some out-of-band signaling mechanism, the expectation value for usefulness of individual feedback is orders of magnitude greater for users than non-users.
Put differently, if I happened to be interested in this SFUSD school as well, is there some list of people like you I should interview?
Put differently, if I happened to be interested in this SFUSD school as well, is there some list of people like you I should interview?
I'm suggesting that, in absence of some out-of-band signaling mechanism, the expectation value for usefulness of individual feedback is orders of magnitude greater for users than non-users.
If you got to the post office to find out about people's experience, your sample will be biased: you will mostly be interviewing people who use the post office much more often than the median post office user.
I go to the post office 1-2 times per year. People like me will be both:
- underrepresented in your sample, and
- be the least likely to have adapted to any difficulties getting to know how the post office works
Some folks who are heavy users of parcel services will have stopped using the post office completely. They will be totally unrepresented in your sample, even though you'd like to know why they use UPS instead of USPS.
Having a relevant Facebook group is about the best case scenario. I guess email might work? Maybe letters? I can't imagine calling or canvasing.
On top of all that I still think the data from actual users is still going to be more valuable overall, even the negative stuff. I'd prefer somebody who attended the school and had a bad experience than somebody who had a bad impression and went elsewhere.
But... I'll agree it's not worthless. It just strongly depends on the type of data you want to collect. For impressions and onboarding, it's a different story. Here's the goal of this study:
> NYPL regularly surveys its patrons to understand and improve how the Library fits into—and adds value to—their lives. We strive to identify the unique power of public libraries, pinpointing precise mechanisms of positive impact, so that we can preserve and strengthen that impact.
If you believe that public libraries serve some purpose, you have to start with that, rather than just using gradient descent to get to somewhere. Otherwise why wouldn't libraries evolve into hospitals, or podcast studios, or brothels?
I love libraries. But this "research" is silly.
Anecdote: While chronically underfunded to a overwhelming degree, local libraries and their staff in my area have consistently stepped up to the plate by trying to support the communities. Most notably when schools around here stopped offering any sort of afterschool/enrichment programing internally for kids, the libraries basically just added to their model.
Doesn't that provide sufficient foundation for a more even evaluation?