Death of the physical library

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/07/28/death-of-the-physical-library/

74 30 3 years ago

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jacknobody3• 3 years ago

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.

moab• 3 years ago

A bit pessimistic no? The interested always find a way, and it has never been easier with the online databases that the author acknowledges as being extremely useful (sci-hub, libgen, etc). What he is lamenting is the loss of serendipity from browsing a physical library shelf; but it is not at all clear that this experience is incompatible with virtual libraries.

OfSanguineFire• 3 years ago

Virtual libraries also lack the ease of keeping several books open in front of you at the same time. This is very important in fields like linguistics, history, or archaeology. I do like my e-book reader and read plenty of Sci-Hub- or LibGen-sourced literature on it, but I can’t realistically buy five e-book readers to half-ass emulate the research experience I am most productive with.

emptybits• 3 years ago

The interested always find a way

Yes, I agree, those who are already interested or motivated need less help.

But to educate most people, and young developing minds especially, brief browsy exposure to unplanned topics is what might create the interest and motivation in the first place. The peripheral glances at compelling covers and spines. The topics you didn’t come to search for and maybe you didn’t even know exist.

You can’t search an opaque virtual library for what you haven’t yet seen a spark or crumb of. Hands-on, tactile, flip flip flip, put it back, flip flip flip … irreplaceable.

mdp2021• 3 years ago

The interested always find a way

We want ignorance to be fought societally - the people you interact with should be as little ignorant as possible.

online databases

Found users are hit with the highest legislative sanctions, increasingly.

tptacek• 3 years ago

This doesn't even make sense on it's own terms. Libraries are communal resources. If you're worried about information available to individuals, what you care about is the ease with which people can procure their own physical books, not how they share them with their communities.

jacknobody3• 3 years ago

I am autodidactic. Therefore I see libraries as a basic education need.

It's not practical to have 100's of reference books and texts, but if I've got access to a good library I can juxtapose several references and texts in a way that digital technologies can't emulate.

Some libraries use wonderful classification systems such as Bliss, which really appeals to me for the way it seemingly shelves books on different subjects according to the kind of thinking thats gone into them.

javajosh• 3 years ago

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

It's worse than that since even if we had books the real knowledge about how to rebuild is stored in past generations of doers. Even if you had a physical book on how to make a smelter, or a car factory, or even how to hunt for food, that is far different than actually doing it, having experience with it. I think many people, especially geeks, vastly overestimate their ability to adapt to changing conditions with the aid of books, physical or otherwise.

Also, you're right - all things being equal, digital content in lieu of physical books is strictly worse. The oldest words we know of were written in stone, clay, papyrus. Words that were written in magnetic particles only 10 years ago are lost entirely.

uwagar• 3 years ago

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.

actuallyalys• 3 years ago

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.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

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

Salgat• 3 years ago

We need to dramatically shorten copyrights for books. The life of an author plus 70 years is insane. It basically guarantees no modern book will ever be in the public domain.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

I can't see why the authors life is even part of the equation. IMO it would be good to have something like 20 years free copyright, and then after that, it becomes a yearly fee, even a small one. The average book would be completely forgotten about by 20 years and would become public domain. While the Harry Potters would be protected for about as long as they are now.

FredPret• 3 years ago

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.

bentt• 3 years ago

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.

tkgally• 3 years ago

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.

wrp• 3 years ago

The pre-Internet library situation in the USA was better than most of the world, so needs to be considered separately. American state university libraries were open to the public and (usually?) had open stacks. The accessibility of these facilities has become increasingly restricted over the past 25 years. At my school, stacks are still open but get fewer new volumes, and most reference tools are electronic and require a school ID to access.

Internationally, access to information has vastly improved. I remember when visiting scholars from 3rd world countries would spend most of their free time photocopying things from the library to take back home.

jhbadger• 3 years ago

In the 1990s (and presumably before, but that was before my time in academia) researchers used to get postcards from researchers in developing countries asking for copies of their articles to be sent to them by (snail!) mail. And we'd do it!

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

These days, books are almost the least important service of a library. They mostly exist as a free social space, events for kids, computer access for the disadvantaged, printers for the average person who no longer owns one. A library I used to leave near even had a room with a digital piano and another with a 3D printer. Giving free access to things that many can't afford is a great public service.

friend_and_foe• 3 years ago

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.

mcphage• 3 years ago

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.

trowawee• 3 years ago

Yeah, the “ew, yucky gay people!” asides are both very revealing about the author and fundamentally undermine his argument for the value of libraries.

mamborambo• 3 years ago

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.

beej71• 3 years ago

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.

wuming2• 3 years ago

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.

Werewolf255• 3 years ago

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.

rchaud• 3 years ago

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?

thesaintlives• 3 years ago

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!

Death of the physical library

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