Have you been to the library lately?
I worked <i>in</i> a library, though not as a librarian, for a long time.  And I had worked in one as a high school student.<p>I no longer support libraries as they stand.  Most of their current issues are self-inflicted.  I will now lay out why.  The Internet came along, and Google of course.  (You remember when Google seemed to have the correct answer to everything, in the past)  And then the scanning of books, and the librarians panicked.  They had an identity crisis: <i>What good is a library in the age of Google?</i><p>This contagious panic spread and the usual questions came about.  &quot;What will we <i>be</i>, then?&quot;  And they immediately started trying to be everything to everyone.  In a university setting, that means that various small groups will immediately come looking.  Maybe the library can help us!  And so the library begins to do things outside of its original scope, further and further.  We begin housing various student groups, despite not having enough space for <i>books</i>.  Checking the logs of the prayer room and the breastfeeding room was a little bitter, but we still need that ... but we have too many books.  Named faculty carrels, we keep those, but we have too many books.  Bathrooms we have, but that one woman just likes to empty her bladder in the elevator.  Librarians, in their helpfulness but lack of identity, have become janitors and people who help you fill out your tax forms and security guards who have to keep an eye out for that guy who likes to jerk off on Level A, in the back.<p>I received a survey from my library a couple of years ago.  Multiple choice: &quot;Are our libraries A) doing enough to help LGBTQ people? B) not doing enough?&quot;  Note the lack of the third option, maybe you&#x27;re focusing on them too much because WHERE ARE THE BOOKS?  My local &quot;civilian&quot; library doesn&#x27;t seem to have anything to lend that isn&#x27;t recent any longer.  It&#x27;s Redbox for books.  The shelves are fewer, the shelves are shorter, the shelves have been shoved back for &quot;community spaces.&quot;  The local loan system is garbage, the statewide system is getting thinner and thinner, and inter-library loan beyond that, well, it used to be great, but they&#x27;re shoveling out books (and I&#x27;m not talking about that thirty-ninth copy of <i>Twilight</i> which was once in hot demand but isn&#x27;t any longer) that were once in most branches I visited.<p>Many academic libraries are playing a game of Hearts.  There&#x27;s only two ways to win Hearts.  The first involves getting rid of your Hearts before the other players do, paring down books.  The other involves trying to collect all the hearts, which makes you the hub of an interlibrary loan system that externalizes the cost of having and housing books, which is not insignificant.  Before she retired, a librarian passed on to me a shocking paper describing the cost per year of the average book just to exist on a shelf.  Most people don&#x27;t think about that.<p>No, I don&#x27;t think a middle ground is what is called for.  Get back to books, by which I mean, the acquisition and organization of information such that the depth of it can be accessed by those in need of it, perhaps more so than they really understand, not just the first thing that Google (or ChatGPT) vomits out.