In the past, college libraries with open stacks of printed books were often the only way to learn of the existence of an obscure book that might be of use to you ... even change your life or at least enhance your research.
They were in close proximity to other books that you knew to be useful. Example: I might be looking at someone's obscure technical book from the 1870s at the college they worked for ... and nearby might be the world's only remaining copy of a bio written by a friend or colleague that mentions facts found nowhere else.
I won't know ... because neither is shelved any more. The 1870s book is found at archive.org. But not the bio. And the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog.
The rewards of the physical browsing experience are lost in the digital age. No way to assess the damage that's been done by hiding college stacks underground in containers. To assess the effect of moving uncommon books to special collections with infrequent hours and stringent requirements.
I have to wonder about the professionalism of the people who too carelessly make the decision to overturn systems evolved by centuries of scholarship.
Thank you for pointing this out. When I would do research in the library, I quickly learned that looking up one book was really just a path to finding the correct shelf in the library, where I could browse an entire shelf of books on the same subject.
While I certainly appreciate the digital modernization of academic work (and in many ways even I am amazed that we wrote papers by hand, on paper, from paper books)... There really is something about just browsing shelves that exposes you to more options that I miss when researching online.
When I was in elementary/middle school I would become familiar with entire racks of books in the library, starting with the Tom Swift and Hardy Boy sections and then moving onto the adult scifi section.
Surprisingly, you can duplicate a lot of the "see similar stuff" functionality through Amazon's recommendation engine (for new books anyway). The other things people have viewed/purchased for any given item are usually quite useful, and aren't limited by physical proximity, e.g. the Band of Brothers DVD listing on Amazon includes in its related items many nonfiction books, which you would never get from the strict categorization scheme in the library.
I wish online library catalogs would do a better job of replicating this recommendation/similarity engine, because on Amazon things tend to be limited just to things that are still in print and for sale.
Your Amazon comment is obvious but I hadn't thought of it.
I have to confess that I still go to my local Barnes and Noble to browse the tech section to see what's new and to browse titles I haven't heard of. I can't do the same at the public library because there are a lot of old books about obsolete tech right next to the (few) brand new books.
The good thing about Barnes and Noble is that their selection is human curated because of their physical constraints. On Amazon, I can spend an entire week browsing the "Customers also Purchased" section.
I've resorted to taking photos of the interesting shelves so I don't have to go there as often.
Theres no technical limitation preventing books online from either having an associated tags system to reproduce locality. Its more that online literature collections are hugely fragmented due to IP policy and are often treading on landmines trying to associate someone elses work in a novel way.
The bandwidth of a shelf is incredibly high. You can review hundreds of titles per minute. Along with the actual title and author data printed on the spine, the book’s condition gives you some hints about its age and popularity. There’s no friction if you want to pause and examine one title more deeply, and you can trivially pick up where you left off once done.
The physical arrangement of books also papers over any deficiencies in the metadata, so that you’ll probably find something relevant, even if its title and keywords don’t match your initial expectations.
It’s obviously not perfect: you need to compare books yourself, since reviews or circulation data are rarely available, especially right at the shelf. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen a web interface that was even close to as efficient as a library or bookshop.
Seems more akin to a user-adjustable recommendation algorithm like Amazon or Netflix uses. Sometimes you want "what other users looked at after searching for this book," or "books with many similar citations," or "books with a similar wordvec distance."
There serendipity encountered in the stories in this thread is essentially just different on one axis: it's not "personalized" or otherwise user-aware, it's content-driven active organization and presentation.
That system can have its own ways of breaking down - consider trying to curate a collection of books on a topic you don't know about - but it gets at the limits of our current algorithmic approaches. Our systems don't know the content itself, just the feedback various others give about the content.
I think a future function of the librarian will be virtual curation more and more (tagging, categorisation, etc..). Similar to what the archive.org people are doing.
> And the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog.
This is what I miss about technical bookstores. Serendipity. And computers can't yet duplicate that, since what is serendipitous often has nothing to do with me until I find it.
I found Calendrical Calculations on the shelf at SoftPro books in Centennial, while just generally browsing. I have never before, and never since, bought a book about calendar systems. What I like most about it was the historical treatment of different calendar systems and definitions of "day." https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calendrical+calculations&t=lm&ia=p...
Had I bought it at Amazon, I'd see all sorts of time and calendar books that I have no interest in. But, I never would have found it to begin with.
Sometimes when buying gifts for hard-to-shop-for people I'll use a random-word generator and put that into Amazon and see what comes up. The process has also found some interesting books for myself that I'd have been unlikely to come across either as recommendations or on my own browsing.
Sometimes you have to be open to a less direct search style, or just pick a new word. For example trying it now, the word was "corrod" (I believe it's meant to be the Welsh plural of "cor", which is "dwarf or pygmy") and nothing was found so I might just move on to a new word. But something in Amazon's systems must be interpreting it as "corrode" and so one of the suggested sub-categories I noticed on the side is "Steampunk fiction". Here's an entire genre I didn't realize existed and would be unlikely to find or notice if it even exists at a library or book store. Now I can go look at random books in that category, or google for "best steampunk fiction" to get some good suggestions for entry points.
You have to create the circumstances for serendipity.
Back when I was a younger my local Borders book store had a 3 shelf nook of extremely technical books around software and engineering. Was incredible. I spent whole weekends there
Powell's Technical Books in Portland also served that purpose for me. I discovered useful things from scanning the shelves that I wouldn't have stumbled upon through directed googling. Their current selection at the main store is much smaller and less productive to browse.
Open stacks also meant that a lot of material got "lost" simply due to being misplaced (i.e. stacked somewhere it wasn't supposed to be). You could replicate the "proximity" simply by adding a topic classification to the library record, and making sure that users can search for "other books on this topic".
Google seems to look for the most relevant topics, then zone in on the one most likely yours, then fill the result set with topics mostly from the one it think you favor. At page three you'll find pages from all kinds of topics. I think this is an ok approach.
But what if instead you filled the result set with the top result from each topic, and then let the user select a topic to drill down, you could have a "more like this" link for each result item and topic. Wouldnt that more resemble what we like about the library? We want to find the right shelf, then browse a while.
I don‘t know, had the exact opposite experience. Back with a C64, the only books in my library were about BASIC, sometimes I wonder what I could have learned with a proper introduction to 6502 assembly. For me, alone without mentors in a small town in the early 90s, I didn‘t even know what else existed and I would have been so thankful to the modern world of Codecademy and Youtube.
This is still true today and is due to the Dewey Decimal system that has conspiracy theories and computer science filed under 000 and 001 as branches of "knowledge"
I'd wager most coding languages are described in their website docs rather than in physical books long before they reach libraries. Only the most popular languages get a full write up more than a few times and then you've got to compete against shelf space already occupied by long useful books. While library organizations orgs have our can get most books, your have to know what you were looking for in advance.
Yes and No. Every library is different. A university library may be better stocked, but my local library's computer section is mostly old books on outlook, Excel, and Photoshop. There are some coding books, but they're mostly old books on VB and the like that might be difficult for someone new to programming to setup. The topics on loops and branching and variables are probably all relevant, but it's harder to learn just by paper.
Our local library gets books only slightly slower than what I can get ordered online. From the time I ask for a book, they often have it on the shelf within a few days, with an automatic reservation for me sent by SMS for pickup at the local branch just outside the door. Of course this is the socialist country of Sweden and we love our libraries... :-)
Last time I got a ZX-spectrum coding book that a friend on a forum wrote. Before that some obscure manga comic book. That one took a few months because they had a hard time to find it, it was long out of print.
They are very open to suggestions even of odd books and very curious librarians, both young and old.
Here in the US, you can use interlibrary loan to get nearly any book from a public or university library. Worldcat [0] is a great resource for finding books in other libraries that can be sent to you free through ILL.
Mine has a place where we can make suggestions, but unless it is a university library where people donate money (Ex: Texas A&M) it might not have a high chance.
I never made the claim that you needed to learn the newest language. Some of the books competing for shelf space are great, long useful coding books. The section in most libraries for coding though is small.
I also never said you couldn't text yourself programming by going to the library, but most of the people who would go to the library to learn coding don't have home computers themselves, I'd wager, and need to use online IDEs which would mean having access to the internet with more up to date resources typically than what's available on the shelves.
In another comment on this topic I brought up that I personally use a blended approach of books for the why's and online for the how's. There's a ton of great coding books out there. Many unfortunately don't make it into library collections and the ones that do typically require either ordering via a hold or just buying outright beggar the library doesn't have it. I'm a huge library lover, you won't find me cheering for their demise.
Sadly, the website documentation for most languages is pretty terrible. Independent authors can take the time to write much more comprehensive educational books that go beyond just a simple language spec and a Github link.
Because there's no site (that I know of) that organizes books this way so you really can't browse related titles like you used to be able to. In the library shelves, you might find books which were related to what you searched -- even though their titles might not make that obvious.
All library catalogs have a browse function. You can see which books are shelved next to each other, although it is a linear display and you can't just "walk" to the next shelves.
> the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog.
I can't think of any technical reason why an online card catalog cannot have proximity, too. In fact, if the card catalog was literally just scanned in, you'd have the same proximity.
Most online library catalogs have a browse function that lets you see which books are shelved together.
A killer app for VR would be to browse Amazon's bookstore virtually. Imagine walking through the shelves of the biggest library in the world, pulling out a book, and reading it (even if it's just a snippet). Add multiplayer capabilities so you can interact with other library patrons and you've got perhaps the most addictive "game" ever created. This could be extended to create virtual product libraries. I would be really surprised if someone isn't working on this yet.
When I was in high-school, I'd drive to the local university and head to the 500s section: astronomy, physics, math, and other science stuff; and though there weren't all that many books, I'd spend a lot of time just looking through them. I'd get a book on blackholes, and it'd lead to physics, etc.
What about wikipedia? From listening to other people, it sounds like I'm not the only one who gets lost in cross-references and ends up in a completely different topic than I started many hours earlier. When "researching" I tend to develop my own "stack" where I force myself back to topics I started with.
Sure, it's only a small part of the web and not primary references. But it is a working example.
Second this. When trying to learn something in a library I very often would look up where relevant material was stored and go to that shelf--and pick what I wanted to actually read from what was in front of me. I found that worked much better than working only from the card catalog.
The computer doesn’t duplicate proximity? So hyperlinks and search engines don’t add more utility to the system than the utility lost by unused library stacks?
The proximity was nice, but mostly proximity of same category topics. That is mostly replaceable if someone makes a search engine on books, perhaps with a Dewey decimal number mode.
Also consider that developed cities and thus universities are becoming more and more crowded. Study space is at a premium. The unused stacks should be kept mostly as wall dividers between new study cubicles, so that the new students have enough places to study. I think overall the utility increase is much higher
When I was in college, books played a bigger role than just wallpaper, although they still weren't used for reading and nobody was browsing through the stacks.
They were great at sound dampening. Studying in the library was great because if there was a row of books between you and the people working on a group project. The books muffled the sound enough to concentrate.
I don't mind losing physical books in the library, as long as we can keep the same ambiance.
Maybe I read too many horror stories when I was younger, but the concept of a "digital dark age" has stayed with me. I never fully trust online resources to be there after a wildfire, flood, or multiple changes of storage format.
Especially for government publications and similar stuff. As the press disappears, online-only records make it easy for bad news to “disappear”.
In the dead tree form, my college library was a federal depository library. There was a treasure trove of data in there, and at 100 other colleges. Much harder to erase.
In my professional life, digitization IMO has produced lots of data, but the practices around it default to “destroy”, thanks to interia and ediscovery. With paper records, keeping stuff around was the natural state.
This is also a major concern of mine, to the point that I actually considered to start printing the English Wikipedia at home, on very thin paper. Sure, it will take a few years (and probably a few printers) and will occupy most of my basement, but at least I will have access to this knowledge in case another dark age emerges.
I am extremely worried that libraries are now replacing physical books by digital representations. If this is going to continue, there will be a point where the slightest global catastrophe will wipe out most of the knowledge of the past 2000 years.
Where would you get a printed encyclopedia that's current? The only encyclopedia that I've heard of that's still actively being published is World Book Encyclopedia and that's meant for grade school children. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica released its final edition in 2010.
There's a lot of unknown ancient material in the Vatican library. Being all concentrated in one spot, it's extremely vulnerable. Nobody seems to care, though.
It is trivial to copy all of Wikipedia to a USB drive. The entirety of published books in the world would fit in an off-the-shelf hard disk under your desk, ready to be duplicated endlessly with zero loss. Now compare that to the sheer amount of human history and knowledge that has been lost through the ages due to wildfire, flood, wars, politics, negligence and every other force imaginable.
Not saying that digital storage is perfect, of course, but asserting that a physical copy of a book in a library somewhere is safer and more accessible than bytes on the internet is ridiculous.
The problem is not only that of preserving the data, but also accessing it.
We can read manuscripts and tablets produced millennia ago, but are already running into difficulties accessing digital media published in our lifetimes.
E.g.
Compare the Domesday Book with the Domesday project:
From my experience as an undergrad and grad student in the 1990s, you can learn a lot about a subject by just going to the relevant section of the library and browsing.
There are many aspects of a library of technical books that I miss online: the curation process, the higher bit rate once you are holding the book, and the lack of distractions in the library.
What I fear may go away is the long form books offer. When exploring a new topic, articles are often too dense. In books, authors can establish the background, help create a shared vocabulary, and motivate what is often so condensed in a research article.
There was just recently discussion about books on HN. It was based on some blog post where the author complained about the book format and how hard it is to remember what you just read.
The discussion revealed that people don't learn in shool how to read and study with books anymore. Of course you don't remember much if you read the book from start to end. E-readers may share the blame. It's very hard and slow to study with e-book. If you spend hours studyin, you really need a book written into a paper.
Books are damn good interfaces for reading long-form text. Footnotes, end notes, indices (sure search is handy—indices are better for some things, though, by excluding invalid partial matches and other irrelevancies) glossaries, integrated author bios and expert introductions, and so on. Multi-page marking with near-instant switching. Two pages visible at a time. Cover, title, and author visible when sitting on the table not actively in use, to help passively absorb and retain that info—ever forget who wrote an ebook while reading it? Spatial recall. Margins to mark on or write notes in. They're excellent. E-book readers are a replacement only for disposable cotton-candy fiction—which has its place, and that part's nice.
Maybe one day computers and digital readers will actually be good enough to replace books. They're not even close today. The tech's just great.
For example, I use Foxit for looking at PDFs. Maddeningly, I cannot view two PDFs at the same time in different windows. There is no technical reason for this limitation, in fact, the limitation was deliberately programmed into it.
I'm pretty sure the people who program PDF readers have never actually used them. (There are a number of bizarre and trivial limitations to them that are trivially fixed. For example, many readers can only remember the last page read for the most recently read PDF. So if you open another PDF, your earlier place vanishes.)
For me, it's only partially a technical problem. If I need to really study something, I always print it out or buy the book. Honestly, I don't really understand why, but I'd guess that my comprehension and patience are at least double when reading a hardcopy.
Another advantage for me of physical books (etc) is that you have something like "tactile memory." What I mean by this is that very often, I can find where something was mentioned basically by how the book feels when its opened (e.g., how thick the pages are in each hand). A similar thing happens with shelves of books.
This is pretty hard to replicate with better tech.
The technical problems are largely trivial, and yet in over a quarter century's use of PDFs, mass-market readers fail to incorporate them. One might begin to suspect an incentives alignment failure within the industry.
I use a (reasonably good) Android reader which affords metadata presentation and editing, but lacks an "author" field.
None of the issues I report ever get fixed, either. I don't bother reporting them anymore. I just complain on HN :-)
I remember on PDF reader on a tablet which would remember your last read position only in the last 3 PDFs you opened. Open another one, and one gets pushed off the bed. I simply cannot understand the train of thought that concluded that 3 was the lucky number here.
It's funny, as someone who grew up with books and the burgeoning world wide web, I hadn't thought of this. When I'm learning a topic I tend to buy or print books so I can soak it in. When I to learn a quick task I go online. Books tend to be great for the why's of something but not the how's. Online is great for the how's but not the why's. I think a blended approach has ended up being the best way for me to learn. I do have a genuine love of books though.
I don't know how this works in the US, but I wonder if allowing/encouraging the general public (i.e. you're not an alumni, and perhaps you never went to college) to sign up and use university libraries would increase usage?
Just had a scan of Glasgow and Edinburgh University's library membership pages. The general public can access the libraries but how and what you're permitted to access can vary between institutions.
If the state of public libraries is anything to go by, no. At least here in the Netherlands, most public libraries that are still open, have reduced their book shelf capacity in the past couple of years and added study spaces, conversation spaces, coffee corners, computer spaces, meeting spaces, and workshops to the menu.
The experience of going to the library now compared to 30 years ago when I was a kid is totally different. Then it was a quiet place with books, catalogues, a reading table, and maybe a computer or two. Now it is a social meeting place.
(What I do wonder is, what were the social meeting places of 30 years ago? Why is there a need for them now?)
Anyway, in my experience with university libraries, unless you know what you're doing research-wise, these libraries are not the most accessible for the outsider. There is a lot of information to wade through, and if you're unlucky, you have to order books you want from the archive/warehouse anyway, which can take from a couple of hours to a couple of days. Unless you can go to the library every day, you will have to plan your visit, search and request the books and materials you think you want beforehand, and hope for the best.
How I miss searching for hours or days in libraries and archives!
All my local university libraries (including a few excellent ones) allow anyone to use the stacks for free. If you want to check something out or you want access to the computer databases you may have to pay to join the "Friends of the Library" or Alumni Association. Access to the databases is often restricted to students / staff though.
People used to access printed materials largely because, well, there was no other choice. Today digital is the native medium of authoring and creation. Sharing, copying, and indexing come “for free” where historically those were high-cost.
Sharing, copying and indexing are things that you can't do if DRM gets in the way. If the alternative is a printed book vs. a fake digital book that you can't actually use effectively because of DRM, I'll take the printed book 100% of the time.
Unfortunately, there's still a lot of information that's locked up only in books. The more obscure or specialized your need, the less likely it is to be found on the web. Countless books will never be digitized because there's no profit motive to do so. And HathiTrust, while useful, keeps most of its PDFs behind a 'paywall' so that you can only download them if you are physically sitting at a partner University. I can't think of a dumber restriction on a digitized book than making you drive to a university campus to download it.
I've been repeatedly surprised and disturbed at how quickly one can hit "go get one of the five copies of this book if you want to know more" on any given topic, when researching online. You don't even have to go that deep. If you're lucky you can spend 30min digging around and find a scanned PDF on some foreign university library's site or something. If not....
[EDIT] and that's just when you can find out that there is something more to find. How many times does the Internet not even know—or if it does, not in any way you could reasonably find—what it doesn't know? I have a whole book that's just a list of works by and about T.E. Lawrence. Books, articles, introductions, collections, papers. It's the length of a normal book, and contains almost nothing but a list of works. It's a book-length bibliography. That's one guy. Granted, famous, but there are tons of people as or more famous/important as/than him. Plus all those topics that aren't single people. Buildings, movements, art works, events. The Web's smaller than one might hope.
Does it follow that dramatically reducing the volumes available in university libraries is the right way to respond to this? Seems to me that might lead to a death spiral for the library by killing its remaining utility to students and researchers.
The article makes it clear that the library still has enormous utility for students and researchers in the form of providing a focused space for study and collaboration. Those needs aren't going away anytime soon, and no other place fulfills them nearly as well as a library.
There's a big difference between a public space like a library, which has no admission price, and a private cafe like a Starbucks, that exists to make money from you.
There's a huge demand for both types of spaces, and said demand is not interchangeable.
In my university there were so many books that part of the comp sci section was in basically crawl space (I was too tall to enter and had to crawl.) It was such a vivid experience, I can't imagine not browsing books as a student.
We absolutely must match the archival properties of books. Send your cold hard cash and public support to archive.org so that not everything is forgotten.
I can't tell you how many of what would eventually be cultural and historic artifacts I've seen just disappear on a failed disk somewhere.
In the past, students read the books in the college library, as it was the best way to find information about the topics they studied. Having their own copy was prohibitively expensive for anything more than the textbooks and maybe one or two books of required reading (this may be an experience in countries with free education, when you're borrowing several thousand a semester, another thousand for textbooks is probably less significant, but it was true in Ireland), and the only other source of information was the college's journal archive which was definitely not aimed at beginners.
Nowadays, most students have a library of pirated PDFs, meaning they have the information on hand where they need it and with no need to return it or find it already borrowed in the college library. Most colleges will give you access to online databases of journals, so they aren't a draw either.
The other problem encountered was that of QC. At least in my institution more substantial books were always in short supply, as they'd never have more than 5-6 copies of a single book, so you'd arrive at the computing section and find... "Java 2 for Dummies". Or "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours". Books that might have been fine to self-learners (when they were not significantly outdated), but nothing that wouldn't be covered in a textbook and nothing more substantial.
Probably this is a disconnect between the people running the library and the lecturers, but the attitude of the library was "Yes, we have software development books. What do you mean 15 years is out of date? The psychology books have been there since the 70s. And our figures show that more students have taken out 'Java 2 for Dummies' than 'Design Patterns' or 'The Pragmatic Programmer', so we don't need more copies."
But those two factors, the greater accessibility of pirated PDFs and blogs (and for some of the slightly more recent students, Stack Overflow), and the lacking quality of what was probably available on the shelves at any given point you chose to look meant that the library was definitely way more useful as a study space than for the contents of the shelves for the other students and myself during my degree.
> Before you tsk-tsk today’s kids for their lack of bookishness, note that the trend lines are sliding southward for graduate students and faculty members, too
Graduate students, and some faculty members, are also "today's kids", depending on your vantage point.
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.
I've found as a graduate student that lots of things I've wanted access to are out of print, and there's been no digitisation other than bad scans that you can only access through LibGen and which I end up printing out anyway.
Journal access is also a pain - digital subscriptions are amazing, but my University is not subscribed to some journals I need access to, or they only have a subscription for papers after a certain date, which is when they stopped buying the print copy.
People think of this as the information age, but we are just approaching it. Libraries as we know them, public and academic, are about to be completely different. Even already the old way is obviously just the same because society doesn't have leadership to advance in blatantly obvious ways because we can't disrupt the cash flow.
They were in close proximity to other books that you knew to be useful. Example: I might be looking at someone's obscure technical book from the 1870s at the college they worked for ... and nearby might be the world's only remaining copy of a bio written by a friend or colleague that mentions facts found nowhere else.
I won't know ... because neither is shelved any more. The 1870s book is found at archive.org. But not the bio. And the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog.
The rewards of the physical browsing experience are lost in the digital age. No way to assess the damage that's been done by hiding college stacks underground in containers. To assess the effect of moving uncommon books to special collections with infrequent hours and stringent requirements.
I have to wonder about the professionalism of the people who too carelessly make the decision to overturn systems evolved by centuries of scholarship.