Information access has changed dramatically in the past thirty years. In my opinion, libraries are defunct. Information, old and new is available on line. Not in a library. My own personal library is just over 10,000 books, I try to keep it at or below that number.
Now the NY Review of Books has a piece praising Libraries. They note:
The public loves the public library. ...a Pew Research Center study from 2016 that showed that more than 90 percent of Americans consider the library “very” or “somewhat” important to their community. Pew researchers also found that about half of all Americans sixteen and older had used the library in the past year. Even so, libraries are often convenient targets for budget cuts. After the financial crisis, in the years 2008–2013, for example, New York City eliminated $68 million from the operating budget of the New York Public Library, which resulted in a dramatic drop in staff hours and in its acquisition budget. (A fair amount of Ex Libris is given over to poignant behind-the-scenes discussions about budgets.) But it wasn’t just the New York Public Library that was suffering. A study by the American Library Association around the same time found that twenty-one states reported cuts in library funding.
I really do not know what the basis for this is. My personal experience with Pew is that they are in my opinion highly biased. But that is my opinion based upon my experience. They continue:
In 2008 the private-equity billionaire .... donated $100 million to the cash-strapped NYPL. The library’s flagship Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, which opened in 1911 and took sixteen years to complete at a cost of $9 million (plus $20 million for the land on which it sits), now bears his name. One hundred million dollars is a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, the patron saint of libraries (and rabid industrialist), whose $55 million largesse—the equivalent of $1.6 billion today—funded 2,509 libraries worldwide, 1,679 of them public libraries in the United States, between 1886 and 1919. Sixty-seven of them were in New York City, sixteen of which are still in use.
Now the unmentioned donor now has his name on my Alma Mater, so my donations go elsewhere, but alas, I have never been to the 42nd Street Library. I have no need to. There is this thing called the Internet, eighteen books and still going strong! I remember my first book, Xerox copies of documents and working in un-air conditioned desks at MIT, the sweat pouring down my arm marking the writing on lined yellow pads. Now, I can sit with multiple screens access indexed files and write and rewrite as necessary. I have been to our town Library once, the have nothing of interest. It is a social gather hole, that is all.
So are Libraries useful? Good question. Perhaps it should be asked.
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