I found Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Facebook post extraordinarily depressing; I’ll reproduce it here (apart from the photos, which show lots of empty shelves) so you can be depressed too (or not, depending on your attitude toward these things):
Empty shelves. What used to be the literature collection of the University of Amsterdam in the PC Hooft building now feels like a ghostly place. Yesterday I happened to pass by and noticed that the doors were open, so I went inside and found myself wandering for half an hour through what used to be a buzzing place full of students, academics and, of course, books.
They are gone. After the summer last year, the UvA opened its (splendid!) new humanities library at the heart of the university quarter in the old city. The new building is beautiful, a great place for students and staff to come and study, and at first sight it looks like a true library, including many study places lined with books. I very much appreciate this new building, and yet the impression is deceptive, for most of the physical books have actually vanished from the library’s collection, replaced by digital copies. The heart is gone. What’s left is essentially an empty shell.
I had a conversation with a colleague who works in the UvA’s library context, and who told me how few books are actually left in the collection. When I expressed my feelings of malaise about this development, she asked me “but how often do you yourself still order a physical older book?” And I had to admit it: rarely. I buy books that I want to read. But like almost every other academic these days, I use digital copies of books that I just need to consult.
I understand the cold financial logic of getting rid of enormous collections of books that are never used (a previous librarian could tell me the exact housing costs for each square meter of books, in a city like Amsterdam where space it extremely expensive). But even apart from the well-established fact that digital books are much more vulnerable than physical ones and may simply not survive the future development of technology (take a moment to imagine what that means!), some unquantifiable quality gets lost forever if one can no longer smell and turn the yellowed pages in a book that was published a hundred years ago. They have an aura.
Most of all, I’m saddened by the managerial “presentist” mentality of not being worried all too much about the destruction of cultural and intellectual heritage. I’ll never forget a small exchange I once had in a café, when somebody asked me what I did for a living and I told her that I was a historian. For several seconds she looked at me with a stunned expression on her face, and finally managed to blurt out: “but… but… it’s over!” She just couldn’t fathom that somebody would be interested in the past.
In fairness, here’s a response from a librarian:
Former academic library director here. This is one of the true occasions in which there is a valid “both sides” argument and to a librarian faced with conflicting needs, there’s no true victor. It’s both win-win and lose-lose.
It was amazing how with one click of an auto-signature I added 10k books to the collection overnight. And when a researcher needed something we could acquire in within three hours rather than the processing time it took to acquire a physical copy. (Note my language: I do not distinguish between e-books and real books. They are all “real.”) You could get an item to a researcher no matter where they were as long as they had internet. They could access an entire collection remotely. (And yes, I actually have a micro fracture in one collarbone from too many years of poorly carrying a book bag!)
At the same time, as has been remarked: browsing a physical collection allows for greater opportunities for serendipitous discovery. Holding an item, marking a physical item allows for greater engagement and recall than what has been called “skimmy dipping” a digital text.
Digital books and physical books, ebooks and tree-books— both have and provide different values and needs. When I was director and made choices I would sometimes go through a decision tree: will we want this for a permanent part of the collection? Is this only helping one person and needn’t occupy valuable and limited shelf space? Will multiple users want or need simultaneous access to the text? &c. It’s a fraught balancing act between access and ownership, shrinking budget and space as publishing continues to pump out more (and more expensive) works.
TLDR? Housing an academic collection especially at the doctoral level is a lose-lose scenario.
Most of the other commenters share my despair.
If only the Great Library of Alexandria had been digitised, we should have all those works still!
I was vaguely aware that the stories about its ultimate sad end were largely mythical, but had not appreciated the extent to which the damage (over many centuries) was actually due to Hellenistic despots unhappy about uppity intellectuals, and to general Roman philistinism*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
Interesting speculation that the notorious remarks placed in the mouth of the Caliph Umar may have actually been the work of (much) later Muslim political propagandists. (The Abbottids, you might say …)
* First they came for Archimedes …
This is a complicated and changing calculus for librarians. Rare books, we might agree, need be sequestered. Most research libraries don’t have enough open stacks room for all volumes. Some departments don’t rely on paper books as much as others, but library budgets are partly affected by some bean counters by visits.
But some subsets, such as a dedicated subset classics library, may keep most. Which books are sent away, and who decides is a problem, and there is no good magical formula; when books often consulted but not checked out (i.e., which are actually or officially reference or course-reserve books) or when, say, Helen Vendler poetry analysis volumes are gone so undergraduates may not happen upon them, yikes. How many of multiple copies to shelve? Depends partly on reliable delivery. Cataloging has increased; browsing has decreased. Years ago some libraries hosted many desktop computers; less needed now. When available, interlibrary loan is great. It’s a complex problem.
In Western culture? That’s very hard to believe.
Who is generating the reliable and everlasting digital copies of books still too young to not be under copyright but too old and obscure for anyone to want to sort through the legalities? Think of all the ones you can only see in “snippet view” if you search the google books corpus.
And of course there are lots of currently-obscure books from 30 or 50 or 80 years ago which are not “rare” in the sense that the catalog’d libraries of the world collectively hold 500 to 1000 copies (plus presumably some more in private hands), even though in a given year somewhere between 0 and 3 of those copies are actually taken off a shelf and opened. But if 99% of those libraries individually decide to discard their underutilized copies, then suddenly it is a book that has become quite rare.
In Western culture? That’s very hard to believe
I’ve encountered this pretty often. An enthusiasm for national myths is a very different thing indeed from being actually interested in the past.
Yes, what DE said.
There’s an earlier generation of losses from this attitude to physical copies. Decades ago, many libraries put their newspaper archives on to microfiche and dumped the paper copies. But those copies are poor quality, and sometimes pages are missing because no-one checked that the low-paid workers doing the copying hadn’t turned over two pages at once.
Even if the microfiches are now digitally scanned, the OCR versions will be full of errors because of the low quality.
Depressing indeed. I understand that librarians face difficult choices and limited budgets, that students and even professors are reading less and doomscrolling more, and I don’t have any magic funding wand to solve such problems with. But if you can’t even trust university libraries to preserve these physical books, who can you trust? And if even universities can’t manage to preserve a culture of actually sitting down and reading through whole books at a time, who will? I use e-books plenty for reference like everyone else, out of necessity, but it’s not a remotely comparable experience; just as the librarian quoted above implies, I get less absorbed and remember it less well.
“In Western culture? That’s very hard to believe.”
I mean, we’re talking about a “Western culture” where a book called “The End of History” became a cultural landmark…
I’ve also noticed that even a lot (though not remotely all, in case that needs spelling out) of historians of modern periods tend to severely devalue any study that doesn’t focus on stuff that hasn’t, say, led very immediately to currently active political structures, conflicts, or the like. Which is a just a kind of variant of the same mentality, really, only a very little more expansively conceived.
I retired from academic librarianship 12 years ago, but even then this was a live issue. I was amazed, visiting the pioneering “learning commons” of another university library, to discover the main content of the building seemed to be scatter cushions and seminar rooms. Obviously, after 30 years of professional engagement I am not naive, or sentimental: spreading too little money ever more thinly to no one’s satisfaction is not a game I recommend. But let me quote from a blog post I wrote a couple of years after retirement:
[quote]
I knew my career in university libraries was coming to its end when our profession, in its over-eagerness to please, decided to smooth away as many as possible of those little difficulties that, essentially, constitute the real, actual educational benefit of using a research library. You know: learning how to look stuff up, determine whether it is relevant, and whether it exists in your institution, and if so, where and in what form, and if not, how to get hold of it. Above all, to discover the variousness of the world of books, information, and scholarship. Yes, it’s inconvenient and frustrating that different catalogues, databases, and reference works all make different assumptions, contain different materials, index them in different ways, and deliver them in different forms and to different degrees of completeness, but learning to navigate these peculiarities is all part of the art of becoming a competent researcher. It’s also a genuinely transferable life-skill: how to be indefatigable in the face of systematic bureaucratic obfuscation…
Or, so it seemed, until we decided the best way to serve our students and staff was to disguise and package up these many inconvenient differences – which still exist – into a one-stop automated vending-machine, capable of delivering instant gratification. Why, kids, you don’t even have to know how to spell what you’re looking for: we’ve taken care of that! Better, you don’t have to get out of bed, as all the stuff on your reading lists is online, right here, ready and waiting! We’ve spent hours of staff time getting hold of all those reading lists, tracking down the copyright holders, and getting it all legally scanned and digitised for you. So no more boring note-taking and queueing for photocopiers! We’ve even made an app, so you can “research” your essay on your phone, and it’s all so damned seamless, frictionless, and flavourless that you won’t know or care whether you’re reading a chapter from a book, an article in a peer-reviewed journal, a newspaper column, or a website put up by a 15-year-old as their school project. Spoon feeding? You’re kidding me: this is more like force-feeding geese for foie gras…
[end quote]
There seems to be no alternative, but our ever greater cultural dependence on potentially ephemeral electronic repositories seems likely to lead to a Great Forgetting at some point in the future, a new (quite possibly literal) Dark Ages, when someone accidentally or deliberately turns out the lights somewhere.
But I don’t mean the fact that she personally isn’t interested in the past. Of course that’s widespread. I mean the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, that anyone was!
BTW, far too few people have read the actual paper. (Requires a free account.)
During the Reagan administration, to save money, the service hours of the Library of Congress were reduced.
In the current administration, funds for research, which in part go to research libraries to pay for books, journals, and librarian salaries, have been reduced.
Voting, so far, is still possible.
I mean the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, that anyone was!
The solipsistic belief that if I don’t know or care about something no one else does either is not that uncommon. The current US President demonstrates this all the time.
I think ’90s software often seemed to at least try to approximate the serendipity of books or articles near the one that you were looking for. In modern digital interfaces such attempts to replicate that aspect of the physical seem to have fallen by the wayside, perhaps because digital implies vast oceans of choice well beyond what’s possible in regular back storage.
Nonetheless, as someone who hasn’t been a student anymore for a while now, the ability to do similar research from home without having to make time to go by an academic library is simply fantastic. It’s very different from being a student or a professional researcher, when you’re nearby already anyway or you have to go there regardless. But in any case, there are still countless undigitized materials to be found at academic and research libraries. 🙂
@Jon
My experience with microfiche is limited to what would’ve been yellowing fragile newspaper. I suspect the microfiche was in better condition, at least for now.
@David
Betteridge notes it ends with a question mark.
I mean the fact that she didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, that anyone was!
As Vanya says, people are solipsistic. I’m surprised this surprises you.
It’s food for thought, albeit a somber meal. I’ve been sorting my collection—more accurately ‘Accumulation’—of books and ephemera with a mind to donating much of it to my college/university special collections library.
Given the direction of research libraries, I ought to verify whether they intend to house printed and especially imprinted volumes. If not…I wonder who else might appreciate, among other curiosities, an assortment of illustrated editions of Don Quijote from five centuries and lots of countries. Suggestions welcomed.
cuchuflete, though I have no say-so, I bet the David M. Rubenstein rare book library at Duke U–which I recall having a strong Spanish program–would be proud to care for your Don Quijote collection.
Rubenstein invested in that library. Like Carnegie, back in the day. Unlike Jeff Bezos, who bought and is now sapping the Washington Post.
a Great Forgetting at some point in the future, a new (quite possibly literal) Dark Ages, when someone accidentally or deliberately turns out the lights somewhere
In my (unpublished) post-collapse trilogy, I call it “the Blinkout.”