> "What's so great about libraries? Seems like a very inefficient way to store/disseminate information in 2018"
I'm going to repeat something I've said previously on Hacker News: people underestimate how much information in books isn't online and just how much useful information is still tied up in those books. Many of us assume everything is mostly online and so it's our first port of call for any research or knowledge gathering.
A few years ago I was researching the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. I wanted to find out about his famous housing complex called Unité d'habitation (Housing Unit) first built in Marseille in France. I started my research online looking for floorplans and commentary or critques. I found very little (there is a lot more available online today, but not when I was looking).
Consider that Le Corbusier is one of the most famous architects of the 20th century so this was a surprise. Eventually, I did find what I was looking for by...(yes, you guessed it) going to the library and visiting an architecture exhibition. I ended up scanning some floorplans from a book (and putting them online). From the exhibition, I came across a video of Corbusier talking about the Unité d'habitation - a great find, and I ended up transcribing sections of that interview. None of this information was available on the web.
It's very easy to fall into the belief that the information you find online is likely to be the best or most recent information available on that topic - so the thought of further offline research at a library never crosses your mind. But there is a huge amount of information and knowledge found in books that has never made it online. If you never go to the library, you won't realise what you're missing.
UK/England: branch libraries in outlying suburbs and small towns/out of town estates are closing as a result of changes in the local authority funding formula devised by the national government. The larger cities have a central library with a full range of services.
In the UK there is the inter-library loan service. As the name suggests, I can track down a reference to a book, then I can request the book via the inter-library loan service, where it is delivered to my local library. I can then borrow the book or consult it on the premises (depends on cost/rarity of the book). Most public libraries will charge a fee, usually a few pounds.
The COPAC library catalogue tells me which university libraries contain copies of the book I want to read which can speed up the inter-library loan turn around (usually 3 weeks).
To me this management of information that has not yet been digitised and that is not widely disseminated is very valuable now and again. Discovery and search made more efficient by free use of (expensively gathered) metadata on a public database.
You also sometimes need a particular book even if the information is available online. I was self-studying for some A-levels, and needs the books that were based on the curriculum. I put in a request with my local library, and a few days later I had a stack of six (or so) books waiting for me.
I still wish I'd found more time to make use of the Cambridge University Library during my degree. It's a tremendous place to work, but I never really took full advantage of it.
This is even true for technical information. I needed to calculate heat dissipation in a HV transformer, and could not find anything online other than brief hand-wavy napkin math. Wouldn't you know it, my small-town library could get the old engineering textbook I needed next day through library loan. Not as convenient as a web page, but I'm glad I thought to check before buying the book used.
Indeed. I've gone to the state library specifically to investigate accounts of Australian indigenous contact and anthropology.
Going through the books on the shelves there, its astounding just how much information exists that is not online at all, not even discounting that which is online but otherwise not freely available and ordered.
I live in Melbourne, Australia. I have cards with the state library, Melbourne city libraries, yarra city council libraries, and a membership with a small private library also in the city.
Firstly, books are still superior to e-readers (which i have and use), and far better than trying to read on a screen. I'll always get the physical copy if i can, and there's still a large number of books which don't have electronic copies. And apart from sci-hub, how else am i supposed to access half of the materials that universities subscribe to if i'm not a member of the library?
Secondly, they provide a quiet space in the city and community where you can go and dedicate to reading, investigation and study without requiring private space (which not everyone has): an egalitarian space. Open to everyone, neither differentiated by money nor access to private space, which is a premium in cities. The libraries variously provide classes, community groups, meeting facilities, IT and technology, television/video facilities,
and event spaces. Yarra libraries has some television screens set up with gaming consoles which I notice the local refugee and public-housing community love to use. There's cafes and eating spaces in at least 3 of the library branches I use. They also provide regularly rotating exhibitions. One provides regular performance music and events.
I value libraries because they maintain an ideal: that knowledge is free, valuable, for the whole community, and that this is important to society, above and separate from private business and the pursuit of money.
Digital has hardly replaced analogue as the superior form of anything. Providing services digitally is more convenient but the experience is still often second rate.
Inefficient? Hardly. A book in paper form is considered by many people to be superior form of digesting complex information.
Secondly, a library contains
a) librarians that help you find what you need
b) huge curated collections of books, carefully categorized
c) the categories themselves! One might learn something new by just investigating what categories of knowledge there are.
Libraries are the analogue manifestation of the entire body of knowledge humankind has collected over millenia. In the past there were these silly VR interfaces in movies where the person could dive into information and find what they were looking for by diving in a sea of information. Well, that place exists in the every manifestation of a proper library adminstered by trained informaticians, and the physical shape of the thing is designed to help one find and digest knowledge.
> a library contains a) librarians that help you find what you need
I wonder how long this will last in Finland, actually. Banking in Finland, for example, has slashed employees drastically and tried to get customers to do as much as possible online instead of visiting a branch and talking to a human being who has to be paid an expensive salary.
So far, at libraries in Helsinki you can easily talk to a librarian who is willing to help you find whatever obscure publications or media you are looking for. But some bureaucrat or political faction obsessed with cost-cutting and automation could see this as a bad thing and believe that library patrons should instead to expected to figure out how to just use Helmet/Helka/Arsca (Helsinki’s library catalogues) on their own, except perhaps for a very limited time slot each day.
As long as books remain physical, labour will be required to handle them. Some parts of the library logistics can be automated, but not all. No robot is going to replace a human librarian any time soon.
I was speaking about the possibility of slashing librarian numbers only in their role as customer-facing reference staff who help people look up information. Of course there will remain a place for some human librarians behind the scenes.
That said, Helsinki libraries have already automated a great deal. You can easily borrow items or reserve spaces without ever having to talk to a human being.
Libraries are designed specifically to be distraction free environments where one can focus. The internet might have all the info ever produced, but it is also the most distracting place ever created. And as more and more people get overloaded with info they aren't trained to deal with the craving for more focus and less distracting spaces is going to increase.
On the internet any half baked article passes for information. In the library the neuroscience floor doesn't have shelves and shelves of books written by kooks, that you have to wade through and filter out to find quality. This is huge advantage if you are doing any sort of serious work.
and probably the only place in America where I can walk in and not be sold something or expected to buy something. Also, in 2018, as you say, my local library has an extensive digital collection which I use on a weekly basis.
Seems like an article from a paper romanticist, and they aren't extinct yet. Anyhow, here in Finland the libraries are not just for paper-based information storage/dispersion, but common places for all kinds of public information/technology needs, like (3D) printing, copying or digitizing material into modern formats, and free guided computing needs for poor or old people. They're also public gathering places, including their conference rooms you can lend, which is also nice for startups without their own offices and such. In any case, they'll have uses far beyond the age of paper-based media, including uses we can't fathom yet.
I love to work from libraries when travelling - quiet, free good quality internet, and no one looks at you sideways if you stay there for hours. The only challenge is having voice calls/meetings; I have to pop out to my car or just wander around outside (depending on traffic noise in the area), so it's harder to have ad-hoc quick calls. That's good for focus though :)
I’d say libraries were a less efficient way of accessing information in 2008. In 2018 we are in a third wave of internet where things are getting dumbed down.
It’s much easier to find useful, factual content in books than via google, especially as social media slop has eaten the world.
Outside of the information angle that many already responded, libraries are also do other things than just store information. For many, libraries are the primary way that they can get on the internet, use a computer, print resumes, become digitally literate, etc... Forward thinking libraries have embraced their role in the community as a place for emerging authors to engage and/or places to capture the information that only exists locally.
My vision for libraries even goes farther, and that in addition to the above they should be default meeting places. Instead of meeting at a coffee shop, people should be meeting at libraries and it should be embraced. Libraries should have sections where discussions can happen, and the local community comes together.
Modern libraries double up as community centers, tool libraries, and (sometimes) maker- or hacker-spaces. They're also hella egalitarian. Anyone can walk in and learn, or be entertained, for free.
Teaching a love of books and learning to children isn't about disseminating information.
There are also many poor folks who don't have the money for the technology you do. The library provides information services to everyone, regardless of social class or ability to pay. What if you were poor and looking for a job and had no computer or phone? To many, the library is a lifeline.
I know that for most of us on Hacker News, we swim in technology and information, but for many others in society, the library is their entry to that world.
The exact same books are available electronically nowadays, and are likely to be more up to date than a paper version. Building a library won't make anyone stop reading facebook drivel.
> The exact same books are available electronically nowadays
Not even close. In 2010, there were about 130 million published paper books.[1] In 2012, there were only 1.3 million Amazon Kindle books available.[2] Note that availability is region-based, so no, those books may not actually be available. Google ebook store launched in 2010 with only 3 million titles.[3] A lot of the Kindle "books" are not even books, they are pamphlets or long articles. Library genesis is only 2.1 million books.
I can tell you don't actually read any ebooks. If you did, you would notice that about a third of the digitized Kindle books have the same review: "the formatting of the book is unreadable, I want my money back."
Many of the older books are not digitised and probably never will be. And reading poorly scanned PDFs on a computer screen sucks. Some of the new books are released in paper only as well. Non-tech books don't get more or less up to date. In fact, paper books are great that they can't be easily edited.
Of course "build it and they'll come" doesn't work. But if we could get more people to come to libraries, it'd be awesome in all sorts of ways. And without building it, nobody will even have a chance to come.
Only if you know how to pirate the book, have internet and are willing to do the pirating. Now I afford to buy ebooks or audio books but as a student I could not buy the c++ gaming programming book, the Linux books were not in libraries and I did not had internet. Even if you afford to buy a book or tow a month, if you have more free time you can get more books from the library, start reading them, see if you like them or not, return them and get other ones.
The copyright compensation on electronic books is different from paper based ones. The super greedy licensing deals (where even available) is one of the things that hold back electronic books; they're simply much more expensive than paper-based ones. The Finnish libraries do have e-books, but they're not as common to loan as paper ones are, and not everything is available in e-book format.
Your don't seem to entirely grok just how many books there are available in deadtree format, and how small a fraction of them are easily (and legally) available in electronic form, not to mention professionally laid out and typeset. Plus how few people actually have an e-book reader.
> The exact same books are available electronically nowadays, and are likely to be more up to date than a paper version.
Huh? I was always under the impression that most of the books are still not available electronically. What may be true is that most of the currently published books are also published in e-book format, but that still leaves out a majority of books.
That is part of probably one of the greatest misconception of our times (yes, slightly dramatic). When something (like information in this case) becomes abundant everything else (time, space, curation, access, price, guidance etc.) becomes more important.
