I have strong feelings about this. When I was in university, I would quite frequently just going wander through the stacks in random sections, look at the titles, and pick up some that seemed interesting. I'd also go to some sections I liked (physics, math) and browse for hours. Frequently I'd end up spending a while looking though several hundred year old books written by the people that invented what the book was about.
There weren't many people that did this, so in my senior year the library decided that the books were a poor use of space, and started tagging books that hadn't been checked out for N years for removal (just with a sticker, I had to ask to find out what the tags were for). Then they started to remove the books, so the 10 aisle section (each aisle with 20 or so full size bookshelves) on physics got reduced down to ~3 shelves. I asked the librarians where they had gone, and they assured me that I shouldn't be concerned because they had just gone to storage, so they could still be requested if needed. But this change meant that instead of just quickly checking several relativity books (indices are great) when I needed further explanation, I would have to search in the catalog and individually request them, which took several orders of magnitude longer.
I have never seen a catalog with an interface that allows replicating the experience of walking through the stacks. Most interfaces allow you to find 1) popular books in some field which are almost always from the last decade or so and reflect what is currently hype, or 2) books with a particular title or author that you are already looking for.
I'm reminded of a study on the dynamics and distribution of academic citations over the past century. I can't seem to find it at the moment (maybe it was referenced in one of Carr's works), but I think the gist is that the breadth of citations has reduced substantially in the last decades. Rather than citing many different papers from many different times, papers have begun to cite that same most-cited papers over and over again (that show up first in the search results), if I recall correctly. Reading a single pdf excerpted from a journal is a very different experience from reading the same article in the physical journal, because in the second you end up flipping past all the other articles which may catch your eye. In the same vein, reading a single ebook (or even requested book from storage) is a very different experience that finding it on the shelf and maybe running across several other awesome books on the way.
It makes me very sad that centuries of knowledge from the best minds of humanity are getting shoved in storage, accessible only via search terms and the like, and replaced by couches where students can sit and browse Facebook/reddit/etc and occasionally work on schoolwork.
That experience was my education. Professors, classes, assigned work — all helpful, but at best secondary to the time I spent in the library, deepening and broadening my knowledge of the fields I cared about. I can't imagine how you could gain from the Internet and your classes the kind of knowledge I gained from those books in that library.
This is a tragedy, and the worst of it is that the people it's happening to don't realize what's going on.
And then there are all of us, so enamored by tech, that we promote the destruction of serendipity in the stacks every step of the way because serendipity isn't searchable. Or something.
There weren't many people that did this, so in my senior year the library decided that the books were a poor use of space, and started tagging books that hadn't been checked out for N years for removal (just with a sticker, I had to ask to find out what the tags were for). Then they started to remove the books, so the 10 aisle section (each aisle with 20 or so full size bookshelves) on physics got reduced down to ~3 shelves. I asked the librarians where they had gone, and they assured me that I shouldn't be concerned because they had just gone to storage, so they could still be requested if needed. But this change meant that instead of just quickly checking several relativity books (indices are great) when I needed further explanation, I would have to search in the catalog and individually request them, which took several orders of magnitude longer.
I have never seen a catalog with an interface that allows replicating the experience of walking through the stacks. Most interfaces allow you to find 1) popular books in some field which are almost always from the last decade or so and reflect what is currently hype, or 2) books with a particular title or author that you are already looking for.
I'm reminded of a study on the dynamics and distribution of academic citations over the past century. I can't seem to find it at the moment (maybe it was referenced in one of Carr's works), but I think the gist is that the breadth of citations has reduced substantially in the last decades. Rather than citing many different papers from many different times, papers have begun to cite that same most-cited papers over and over again (that show up first in the search results), if I recall correctly. Reading a single pdf excerpted from a journal is a very different experience from reading the same article in the physical journal, because in the second you end up flipping past all the other articles which may catch your eye. In the same vein, reading a single ebook (or even requested book from storage) is a very different experience that finding it on the shelf and maybe running across several other awesome books on the way.
It makes me very sad that centuries of knowledge from the best minds of humanity are getting shoved in storage, accessible only via search terms and the like, and replaced by couches where students can sit and browse Facebook/reddit/etc and occasionally work on schoolwork.