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.