I admit, I haven’t been to a public library in over a decade, but 20 years ago a large majority of my university’s libraries’ collections were also stored offsite. As you note, you could request them days in advance and pick them up at a counter. In contrast, when I did need to check out physical books that were already present, I would need to look up their locations across 10 stories of a single library, or in any of 70 other libraries, spending hours walking around to collect them. Other volumes that were very similar for my purposes could be as much as a mile away. Beyond a relatively small number of volumes, physical presence in a building is not a good metric for ease of browsing and exploration.
It is a good question, what are libraries for nowadays? I’m not sure.
You know what I’d really like? To see VR/AR get good enough that physical browsing can actually show me all the works relevant to what I need, then pull up virtual copies (of which I can request physical copies if I want), without being limited to each item being located at only one point in 3D space.
I admit, I haven’t been to a public library in over a decade, but 20 years ago a large majority of my university’s libraries’ collections were also stored offsite. As you note, you could request them days in advance and pick them up at a counter. In contrast, when I did need to check out physical books that were already present, I would need to look up their locations across 10 stories of a single library, or in any of 70 other libraries, spending hours walking around to collect them. Other volumes that were very similar for my purposes could be as much as a mile away. Beyond a relatively small number of volumes, physical presence in a building is not a good metric for ease of browsing and exploration.
It is a good question, what are libraries for nowadays? I’m not sure.
You know what I’d really like? To see VR/AR get good enough that physical browsing can actually show me all the works relevant to what I need, then pull up virtual copies (of which I can request physical copies if I want), without being limited to each item being located at only one point in 3D space.