One of the sad realities about physical libraries is that they are dying, at least in American university systems that have been parasitized by management consulting firms.
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
I periodically go to the Library of Congress to read things for various side projects. It's sad how few people actually use the Library of Congress as a library. There are a lot of tourists there. I usually go to the Science and Business Reading Room, which avoids most of the tourists as they check out the Main Reading Room. But attendance is usually sparse, perhaps 2 dozen per day.
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.
Seconding this. I haven't been there in forty years, but back in the day the place was a goldmine of hard-to-find books. And a housemate told me that it wasn't hard to get "stack privileges" (the right to actually physically browse the stacks) if you made a sufficiently favorable impression on the staff.
> students are reading much less than they used to, and far less in the way of physical books
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 agree they are symbolic, but I believe we should see them as a symbol of how much knowledge has been created that yet remains potentially untapped and unexplored.
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.
Sounds like a noble project. Why does each University need to do that though?
> 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.
Students do read, it's just that they prefer to burn their energy on course textbooks, which libraries have in very low supply. It's very hard to be a student that avoids buying books and instead borrows their way through university.
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.
What is funny is that the background one sees on remote interviews on TV is nearly always a bookshelf. The books are carefully curated to give the right impression to the viewer. I wonder if the person had actually read them, or it is just window decoration.
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.
> What is funny is that the background one sees on remote interviews on TV is nearly always a bookshelf. The books are carefully curated to give the right impression to the viewer. I wonder if the person had actually read them, or it is just window decoration.
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.
Haha...I often don't pay attention to the interview itself and spend the entire time bothering my wife with questions like, 'I wonder why they picked that book/picture/background?'
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.
Think of what a librarian could be today in the context of LLMs — there are completely different ways of accessing and organizing information — ways that will continually evolve in next few years.
In Europe it is legal to scan library books and use the contents with ML, per EU directive.
Still the case in 2025, at least at all the universities I frequent.
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.
I have often heard this described as a change in how people of different generations access information. Younger people today are used to using search bars to find what they need immediately [1], but older people like myself grew up used to it taking time to find relevant information, and often had to organize the information ourselves. Younger people aren't using the library because from their perspective, information is just available everywhere and immediately available on top of that. From their perspective, there simply is not need to go to the library if you can find what you need immediately.
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.
Perhaps it’s changed, but my experience is that most information just isn’t available online.
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 actually agree with you completely. That is why I emphasized that I was just giving their perspective. I don't think most information is available online, let alone available online immediately.
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.
I absolutely believe it, but it feels so crazy as the libraries, both as a student and as a community member at various points, for the local universities are by far the most useful and important resource they provide.
But are they reading books? At the college campus here, there are many students in the library, but the proportion that are reading books there seems to have gone down over time.
You can check out books from the library and read them anywhere. Why do students need to read them in the library? If you are conducting certain research you need books as not everything is digitally available. Granted, most students are not doing this kind of thorough research.
That's true, but are they checking out books? :-) I just mean that from what I've seen, young people use libraries as a study space at least as much as they use them to obtain books (either for on-premises readng or for checkout).
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