The old Beatles song "Imagine" asks the listener to think what life would be without Heaven. Libraries are not Heaven, but they perform a little-considered yet essential role in the cultures of many nations. And some recent trends in library science and the way academic libraries are operated makes me wonder if we're heading toward the extinction of libraries as we know them.
With the invention of writing around 3000 B. C. (which took place in several locations around the world), it first became possible to store thoughts in physical form. This had a profound effect on the way governments and individuals operated. For the first time, a disputed question could be referred not simply to the oldest and wisest person around, but to a written record that doesn't change.
Until the invention of printing, books and libraries were expensive, and access was limited mostly to the ruling and most prosperous classes. The establishment of universities around 1200 A. D. led to the founding of research libraries, where scholars could go to learn the best of what had been taught in the past. Both the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions depended vitally on libraries and the written word to propagate new knowledge and built upon what was learned. Western civilization itself is unthinkable without widespread access to standard works of philosophy, government, science, and the arts which can be found, in a last resort, at a library.
Then came the digital revolution. Some interesting statistics from a 2023 report of the Association of College and Research Libraries shows that while research universities—those which grant doctoral degrees—still have an average of 71% of their collections in physical form, only about 1.6% of all circulation in university libraries represents physical objects. All the rest is in digital form. And for all other types of colleges and universities—four-year bachelor-granting, master's degree only, and two-year and community colleges—the vast majority of their holdings are digital. The bottom line is, physical books and journals are largely a thing of the past as far as university libraries are concerned. And the research libraries which still hold physical books and journals are moving them as fast as they can to offsite storage facilities, which are much cheaper to maintain than open stacks of real books.
Okay, you say, so what? Libraries used to house big awkward scrolls, then hand-written tomes, and now it's mostly digital. The information is still there, and now it can be accessed by a wider variety of people. What's to complain about?
Two things come to mind.
The first is what I would call the curatorial function of libraries and librarians. Even on the level of a small town library, before the digital revolution their physical collection represented a hierarchy of importance, as assessed by educated professionals who knew what kinds of things a library should have in it for the particular place and time. If a wacko walked in from the street trying to hand out brochures warning of an imminent zombie apocalypse, the librarians would listen to him, maybe, but after he left they'd dump his brochures in the trash.
No more. Mr. Zombie Apocalypse has his own website, X account, Facebook page, and probably a Substack blog too. And while the reference librarian isn't going to point you at his page, there's nothing to stop you from going there. Even the little Guinness-Book-of-Records type questions that people dream up are no longer asked of librarians. Everyone carries around a little oracle in their pocket, and all you have to do is ask the oracle, and you'll get some kind of answer.
Librarians are aware that their former core function—to curate what they regarded as the most important information for a locality, whether a small town or a big university—is being steadily usurped by Google, Facebook, and now AI bots. So they are busy cultivating other activities to host: meetings, social events, makerspaces, and other doings that serve the communities for which they feel responsible. So far, it has worked, but sometimes I wonder whether people will forget what libraries are for in the welter of auxiliary activities and services that librarians are coming up with.
The second and most scary downside to all this is one that's unlikely, but for certain places it's already become a reality, at least for a while. In the recent turmoil in Iran set off by severe inflation, the government essentially shut down that nation's internet in late December. And of this writing, the shutdown continues.
The ostensible reason was to quell political protests, but the effect has been much wider than simply to keep people from organizing anti-government demonstrations. I'm sure that to the extent Iranian libraries have embraced the digital revolution and dispensed with their physical collections, they are currently regretting any progress they have made in that area.
It can't happen here, you say, "here" being North America, Europe, or most other places with so-called enlightened governments. Well, if you got in a time machine and went back to 1966 and told people there that in 2026, we'd have seen riots at the U. S. Capitol aimed at disrupting the results of a presidential election, unilateral action by the executive branch to impose tariffs and trade restrictions, to kidnap heads of other governments, and to intimidate leaders of the legislative and judiciary branches with spurious lawsuits, they might not have believed you.
I'm not trying to criticize any particular administration, but to point out that an all-electronic library that relies on the internet has certain vulnerabilities that physical documents don't have. This is not to say that we should reverse the trend toward digital archiving of information, though that is a sore subject on its own. But in going the internet-based route by exchanging physical stuff kept in one place for digital stuff in the cloud, libraries have vaporized the main reason that people go to them. If you can go straight to the cloud for information, guided by AI companions that are smarter than a hundred librarians, why bother with libraries?
That's a question librarians will have to struggle with in the future. For their sake and for the sake of all cultures who have benefited from libraries in the past, I hope they come up with some good answers.
Sources: The 2023 report by the Association of College and Research Libraries "The State of U. S. Academic Libraries" is available at https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2024-10/2023%20State%20of%20Academic%20Libraries%20Report.pdf. I also referred to the Wikipedia article "2026 Internet blackout in Iran."
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