Libraries are archiving physical stuff. Digital stuff is pretty hit-or-miss.
Worse, digital stuff is owned by a monopoly that's actively making it harder to find or get anything online, when it is made available to libraries at all.
Add on top the problem with DRM - if there are no physical libraries (bad idea) suddenly, how many libraries should there be? Who gets to make that decision? DRM is predicated on not letting everyone get a copy, but this flies directly in the face of the point of libraries, where everyone may share a copy. You either can have infinite libraries in which case DRM is redundant and should be removed, or you can only have very few, in which case DRM is literally nothing other than a tool of oppression, and should be removed (by executing by firing squad the cranks hoisting their vision of a only-rich-people-get-stuff world).
There are ways in this post-physical copy world of making sure creators get paid still, but lets just say, the incentives are just not there.
Incorrect: libraries are indeed archiving scholarly journals like the ACM ones, even when they are online-only. For instance, CLOCKSS: https://clockss.org/
Essentially, CLOCKSS member libraries operate scrapers to download and archive copies of all covered journals. If a journal publisher disappears or deletes its back issues, the CLOCKSS members have agreements allowing them to republish the contents.
So there are a bunch of academic libraries holding copies of the content of academic journals for long-term preservatino.
Hopefully they are at least archiving it. I know the library of congress takes their role in doing this seriously. A lot of the DRM protected stuff is not made generally available, but it is archived for future use.
Libraries are archiving physical stuff. Digital stuff is pretty hit-or-miss.
Worse, digital stuff is owned by a monopoly that's actively making it harder to find or get anything online, when it is made available to libraries at all.
Add on top the problem with DRM - if there are no physical libraries (bad idea) suddenly, how many libraries should there be? Who gets to make that decision? DRM is predicated on not letting everyone get a copy, but this flies directly in the face of the point of libraries, where everyone may share a copy. You either can have infinite libraries in which case DRM is redundant and should be removed, or you can only have very few, in which case DRM is literally nothing other than a tool of oppression, and should be removed (by executing by firing squad the cranks hoisting their vision of a only-rich-people-get-stuff world).
There are ways in this post-physical copy world of making sure creators get paid still, but lets just say, the incentives are just not there.