Books In The Libraries Are Becoming Simply Wallpapers Due To The Evolving Technologies

In the past, students read the books in the college library, as it was the best way to find information about the topics they studied. Having their own copy was prohibitively expensive for anything more than the textbooks and maybe one or two books of required reading, and the only other source of information was the college's journal archive which was definitely not aimed at beginners.

Nowadays, most students have a library of pirated PDFs, meaning they have the information on hand where they need it and with no need to return it or find it already borrowed in the college library. Most colleges will give you access to online databases of journals, so they aren't a draw either.

At least in my institution more substantial books were always in short supply, as they'd never have more than 5-6 copies of a single book, so you'd arrive at the computing section and find... "Java 2 for Dummies". Or "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours". Books that might have been fine to self-learners, but nothing that wouldn't be covered in a textbook and nothing more substantial.

Probably this is a disconnect between the people running the library and the lecturers, but the attitude of the library was "Yes, we have software development books. What do you mean 15 years is out of date? The psychology books have been there since the 70s. And our figures show that more students have taken out 'Java 2 for Dummies' than 'Design Patterns' or 'The Pragmatic Programmer', so we don't need more copies."

But those two factors, the greater accessibility of pirated PDFs and blogs (and for some of the slightly more recent students, Stack Overflow), and the lacking quality of what was probably available on the shelves at any given point you chose to look meant that the library was definitely way more useful as a study space than for the contents of the shelves for the other students and myself during my degree.

I have strong feelings about this. When I was in university, I would quite frequently just going wander through the stacks in random sections, look at the titles, and pick up some that seemed interesting. I'd also go to some sections I liked (physics, math) and browse for hours. Frequently I'd end up spending a while looking though several hundred-year-old books written by the people that invented what the book was about.

There weren't many people that did this, so in my senior year the library decided that the books were a poor use of space and started tagging books that hadn't been checked out for N years for removal (just with a sticker, I had to ask to find out what the tags were for). Then they started to remove the books, so the 10-aisle section (each aisle with 20 or so full-size bookshelves) on physics got reduced down to ~3 shelves. I asked the librarians where they had gone, and they assured me that I shouldn't be concerned because they had just gone to storage, so they could still be requested if needed. But this change meant that instead of just quickly checking several relativity books (indices are great) when I needed further explanation, I would have to search in the catalog and individually request them, which took several orders of magnitude longer.

I have never seen a catalogue with an interface that allows replicating the experience of walking through the stacks. Most interfaces allow you to find 1) popular books in some field which are almost always from the last decade or so and reflect what is currently hype, or 2) books with a particular title or author that you are already looking for.

I'm reminded of a study on the dynamics and distribution of academic citations over the past century. I can't seem to find it at the moment (maybe it was referenced in one of Carr's works), but I think the gist is that the breadth of citations has reduced substantially in the last decades. Rather than citing many different papers from many different times, papers have begun to cite that same most-cited papers over and over again (that show up first in the search results), if I recall correctly. Reading a single pdf excerpted from a journal is a very different experience from reading the same article in the physical journal, because in the second you end up flipping past all the other articles which may catch your eye. In the same vein, reading a single eBook (or even requested book from storage) is a very different experience that finding it on the shelf and maybe running across several other awesome books on the way.

It makes me very sad that centuries of knowledge from the best minds of humanity are getting shoved in storage, accessible only via search terms and the like, and replaced by couches where students can sit and browse Facebook/reddit/etc and occasionally work on schoolwork.

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