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Comment by SMV279438 | Hacker News Reader

I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing.

Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.

But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.

I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.

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I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's basement where they remain to this day.

Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day. Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a real way by not giving them access to this.

Never too late to go back and start up a physical library.

I had the experience at uni in the 1980s of seeing the film The Last Emperor, which at one point includes a bit where a Time Magazine photographer is present. I realised that this probably meant that Time had run an item on the (then newly-crowned Japanese puppet) emperor Puyi of Manchukuo (occupied China).

So I headed to the campus library, serials room, which had bound volumes of Time along with many other publications, and shelf-scanned the appropriate date ranges around 1934 until I found the edition with the story. Read that, which was insightful (a question I'd had was whether or not Puyi was seen at the time as a puppet, and yes, he very much was).

I am fearful that this experience could not be replicated today, and that those stacks may well have been cleared.

Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items available on inter-library loan.

I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.

I agree to some degree. But I'd also note that some of the biggest libraries don't have open stacks.

Years ago I did an exploratory UX spike, an attempt to make history more tangible, by giving each day a dot (so a couple of centuries fit on a screen), with the dots providing, among other things, scans of that day's newspapers and magazines. Nice for browsing/surfing history. Part of not pursuing it further, was newspapers - and historically there were many many more newspapers per region, let alone per person - newspapers were already mostly paywalled, and becoming less available with time. Even libraries which did their own scanning of archived local papers, would grow tired of support, and turn them over for paywalling. My understanding was there was little money in it, but all it takes is enough to scatter moats everywhere, to make a terrain inaccessible to broad access.

Utah Valley University?

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