Technological devices come and go, empires rise and fall, but libraries persist.
—Dennis Dillon1
The idea of the public library is, on the face of it, improbable. Only recently in human history has there been widespread agreement that people have human rights deserving of universal respect. (Remember that the United States enforced chattel slavery until 1865.) The idea that every person should be educated is an even more recent and radical one. The idea that society should provide its members with the means to continue their education independently was more radical still.2
The radical notion in the last sentence of this quotation encapsulates the true value of libraries—simply that libraries allow every person in the communities served by those libraries to continue his education, to become more knowledgeable, and to live the life of the mind in the way in which he chooses. This essence of the value of all libraries is sometimes obscured by the day-to-day minutiae of library use. A person asking a question in a corporate library, a child listening to a story in a children’s library, a person consulting an academic library’s online databases—none of these may be thinking of himself or herself as being engaged in lifelong learning, but each of them is.
Through lifelong learning, libraries can and do change lives, a point that cannot be overstated. Within that overarching value—and depending on the community it serves—a library is one or more of the following:
• a focal point of a community
• the heart of the university
• the one good place in a city
• the collective memory of a research institution
• the place remembered fondly by children when grown
• the solace of the lonely and the lost
• the place in which all are welcome
• a source of power through knowledge
When looking at the image of libraries over the years, it is easy to see that the public perception has varied and, though libraries are almost always viewed positively, they are not always understood and prized for what they are. The phase we are going through now illustrates that well. Public misunderstanding of information technology and its potential has led to misunderstanding of the reality of libraries and of their present state and possible futures. Let us look at the development of libraries and at the threats and alternatives with which we are faced.
An unprecedented growth in libraries and the development of the profession of librarianship took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. Thousands of libraries of all kinds were built (many with the conscience money of Andrew Carnegie). The great public and private university libraries of the United States came to flower. Public library service was extended to almost every citizen. The profession of librarianship saw the establishment of national library associations; the creation of a system of library education; the beginning of scientific study of libraries and their users; and the intellectual innovations of cataloguing codes, classification schemes, professional journals, and collaborative systems of all kinds. In less than a century, modern libraries and librarianship were born and came to maturity and self-confidence. It was an age of great achievements and of library heroes and heroines—the first if not the last Golden Age of Libraries. The interwar years of prosperity and depression followed those years of the founding of the modern library. Libraries grew in number and size in the 1920s and were an incalculable public good in the hard years of the 1930s. Libraries survived the Second World War, as did many social entities, with a feeling that, with fascism defeated, we were in for progress as far as the eye could see.
In those years following World War II, many librarians assumed that libraries were so patently, palpably good that they needed no justification. They had a basis for that opinion. Communities took their libraries for granted; academic institutions competed with each other about their libraries and boasted of the size of the collections and the excellence of their staff; schools gave pride of place to their libraries and librarians; and companies, governments, and other entities developed libraries and library services at a great pace. This largely happy state of affairs came to a screeching halt sometime between the first Carter energy crisis in the 1970s and the first Reagan recession in the 1980s. Decline and decay became the order of the day, and most libraries hit rock bottom in the early 1990s. From the mid-1990s to the waning years of the George W. Bush presidency, libraries bounced back. Then the greed-is-good Gordon Gekkos scuppered the global financial system and gave us the long dark years of the Great Recession. They have been years characterized by the collapse of the housing industry and local taxes, by massive unemployment, and by misguided slashing of public services (the ideology-fed punishment of the victims while the perpetrators wallowed in their sublime One Percent-ness). Funding (or rather, the lack of it) was the main proximate cause of the travails of libraries in this and previous dark ages. It would be a grave mistake to blame funding alone. The fact is that precipitous declines in funding have occurred at almost the same time as the steep increase in the cost of library materials and the rise of information technology (hardware, software, infrastructure, and staff) as ever-hungry consumers of more of library budgets. The combination of these factors has been almost a deathblow for some and a grievous problem for all.
In the early days of the automation of library processes, many administrators (and even some librarians who should have known better) really believed that it would save money. Similarly, the extraordinarily rapid growth in the number of digital resources available to libraries and their users caused some to believe that those resources would supplant expensive collections and services. In both cases, the opposite has proven to be true. Digitized library processes may be more cost efficient than manual processes, but that is because they increase efficiency, not because they lower costs. The “inevitable” coming of the all-digital library has been just around the corner for more than two decades, and the corner is as near and far away as ever at the time of writing. Economics, practicality, and human preferences are the intertwined strands of the problem.
Let us suppose that the all-digital library is a desirable aim and all that remains is how to get there. One important component would be that all the texts now available in printed form would be available in digital form. It would require total digitization of the contents of the libraries of the world resulting in readily accessible, readable versions accompanied by high-level, usable catalogues. Any user of the results of the Google digitization project and other smaller similar endeavors knows that they do not, in reality, come anywhere near to meeting the specifications of that requirement. They are, in reality, text atomization projects that deliver snippets of text out of context, yielded by free-text searching of the kind that is useless for most scholarly research. Even if the digitization requirement were to be met, what is the economic infrastructure that will make available in perpetuity, say, minor nineteenth-century novels or eighteenth century plays or seventeenth-century religious treatises? The millions of poorly printed books from previous centuries are further degraded by digital scanning. Are we to rely on what is, essentially, a digital advertising broker to maintain the human record for twenty-second-century, twenty-third-century, twenty-fourth-century . . . humans? The great libraries of the world exist, in one sense, to preserve the little-used and the forgotten parts of the human record for posterity. Is that a function likely to be carried out by a rapacious commercial concern that kowtows to repressive dictators in search of the almighty dollar? Who is to say that commercial concern may not, when in decline financially, jettison huge databases that make them very little money? It would fly in the face of history if they did not.
Scholarly journals pose other conundrums. Much as iTunes has changed the unit of musical sales from the expensive album to the inexpensive song, users of scholarly journals have made it evident that it is the article to which they wish to have access, not the journal or even the issue of the journal. An ideal system would be one in which all individual articles were assessed, rated, added to databases, and made available inexpensively. Unfortunately, there is no economic or scholarly architecture to provide such a system in sight; hence the chaotic state of journal publishing. (A separate but germane question is, why do we need the “journal” anyway in a world in which the article is the desired object?) Though there are many more purely digital journals than before, the lack of a satisfactory economic model has impeded an orderly transition. In particular, if print journal publishers cannot make money publishing digital-only journals and go out of business, what will happen to scholarly journal publishing?
Music and film publishing are similarly in a state of flux, to put it kindly. The future of newspapers is cloudy, but none of the forecasts are encouraging. It is said that we all want the instantaneous gratification of everything online everywhere as long as it is free, but I see paper everywhere I look, and those who are online or on smartphones all the time are reported to be up to their ears in Kardashians, cute cats, and K-pop. Is that how the human record will end—in a swamp of trivia? I would like to think not and, even more, that libraries embracing all forms of communication are what can save us from that fate.
Before discussing alternatives to the “traditional” library, it would be well to describe that library. I use the word “traditional” with great reluctance and simply for want of anything better—its pejorative overtones of clinging to the past, of being place-centered and exclusively book-centered, bear no relationship to the experience of modern libraries. The only other available term—“real library”—implies that there is something illusory about the terms “virtual library” and “all-digital library.” Though tempting at times, it is a serious mistake to treat the all-digital library as merely high-tech smoke and mirrors, though most writings in favor of virtual libraries have a decidedly glassy and cloudy aspect, smacking more of conjuration than reality.
My idea of a “traditional” library is of one that selects, collects, and gives access to all the forms of recorded knowledge and information that are relevant to its mission and to the needs of the community it serves, and assists and instructs in the use of those resources. More than that, the “traditional” library welcomes, as it always has, new forms of communicating knowledge and information—including digital resources.3 The “traditional” library is not one that rejects change and innovation; it is a library that welcomes all means of serving its community better. The conflict between “traditional” libraries and all-digital libraries turns out, under examination, to be an elaborate shadow dance choreographed carefully by those who think that real libraries are obsolescent. The true choice is between real libraries with a substantial component of digital services and collections, on the one hand, and a replacement that has only digital services and collections, on the other. We have to think about building and maintaining a global network that collectively constitutes a vast repository of recorded knowledge and information (the human record) organized for ready access (the library) as compared to the strikingly disorganized wilderness of cyberspace. Proponents of the all-digital library will, of course, say that we are on the low beginners’ slope of the mighty mountain yet to be scaled, but we seem to have spent a long time there; and, in any event, one cannot analyze predictions and promises unsupported by evidence and adding up to little more than virtual sleight of hand—still less refute them.
The alternative to real libraries is sometimes called “the library without walls”—a silly term that implies current library service is contained entirely within the walls of library buildings. It is sometimes called “the digital library” and, other times, “the virtual library.” In a remarkable paper, Jean-Claude Guédon demonstrates that the two latter terms are not synonymous.4 “Digital” refers to the practice of recording information in terms of zeros and ones—that is, a means of recording and storing that is different in kind but not in degree from other means. One might as well refer to a nineteenth-century library as a “letters-on-paper library.” In Guédon’s thinking, the term “virtual library” refers to something a good deal more ambitious—one in which all the library’s functions, processes, staffing, mission, and purpose are reconsidered, reorganized, and shaped around digital documents. Whether such a transformation is practical, possible, or even desirable is the central question of the future of libraries. There are, when it comes down to it, only the two mutually exclusive alternatives. One, which has the weight of history behind it, is the library of the past and today incorporating digital resources into its programs, collections, and services, and making the necessary changes to allow that incorporation. This is what libraries have done over the centuries as new means of communication (successively manuscripts, printed texts, printed music, cartographic materials, sound recordings, films of all kinds, digital resources of all kinds stored and delivered in a variety of ways) have arisen; and, because of that process, libraries have been changed and enriched while preserving a tradition that spanned the centuries. The alternative—the all-digital library—calls for a break with that tradition: the complete replacement of all other forms of communication in favor of digital documents. We should note that the balance of “traditional” resources and services will vary greatly from library to library, depending on the type of library and the clientele served. The range will have medical, law, and science and technical (e.g., engineering) libraries (with a preponderant or even exclusive reliance on digital resources and services) at one end, and rare book and children’s libraries at the other.
The all-digital library has been the subject of a tsunami of books and articles far too numerous to list here. (Only a mean-minded person would ask why so many prophets of the imminent all-digital future turn to print on paper to communicate their message.) All those books and articles concentrate on the how of creating all-digital libraries (if only rarely the financial “how” and its implications), base their writings on unquestioned assumptions, and never examine the why or especially the eternal skeptical question, who needs it? The all-digital library calls for the demolition of the traditional library (literally as well as figuratively) and new ways of looking at every aspect of the library. In fact, there is good reason to ask if the word “library” is applicable in any sense when talking about the all-digital library. Guédon is at pains to point out that there is a difference between “virtual” and “unreal” in this context, stating that “the virtual is nothing but potential and as such it is reality (possibly) in the making.”5 Charles Martell echoes Guédon in saying, “The creation of a readily identifiable ‘intellectual and logical’ cyberspace for libraries will be of the utmost importance . . . decades from now when the physical library will be less visible to the public than the virtual library in the new cyberspace environment.”6
These are fascinating, if complicated, topics, and Guédon’s and Martell’s vision of the virtual library as a transformation in the act of becoming is a welcome change from the dreary mechanism and determinism of most writers on the topic. However, whether one approaches the virtual library as a vision or as a technical process, there still are some unavoidable questions to be asked and some hard answers to be sought. The first question, and the hardest to answer, is . . .
It seems that proponents of the virtual library have only three possible answers to that short question. The first is practical and financial—the ease of online access, the increase in access for people distant from physical libraries, and the supposed financial savings are seen as outweighing any and all of the disadvantages of digital documents (e.g., being mutable, perishable, and unverifiable). The second is teleological—that there is a grand design and the virtual library represents an inevitable manifestation of progress toward the fulfillment of that design. To believers, there is an inevitability about each innovation in human communication, and each innovation is demonstrably superior to its predecessors.7 The only other answer is “why not?”—one that is offered implicitly by those who take up each fad and accept without question banal phrases like “the age of information.” I discuss rationalism and irrationalism elsewhere in this book, but pause here to suggest that answers to “Why the virtual library?” that are based on belief in a grand design or on unthinking acceptance are not intellectually coherent. The practical arguments are more easily quantified and can be used to justify a virtual component of library service but, by no means, the idea of an all-digital library. Moreover, even if you believe that digital communication is part of a great plan, it is difficult to argue that each form of communicating and recording knowledge is superior to its predecessors. What happens is that human beings concentrate on the positive aspects of all innovations and tend to underplay or stay willfully ignorant of the negative consequences and attributes until they are so manifest—often long after the bloom is off the rose—that they can no longer be ignored. Proponents of digital communication stress the ease and speed with which messages are created and disseminated, but rarely dwell on their lack of durability. Politicians and computer scientists have pressed successfully for schools to be enabled to give all schoolchildren online access, but ignore the underfunded or nonexistent libraries in those same schools and the negative effect of such neglect on reading and the literacy levels of those schoolchildren. Futurists predict that digital technology will supplant “the book” sooner rather than later, but ignore the fact that technology has made book production and high production values quicker, easier, cheaper, and more accessible to more publishers.
One librarian who has looked at the all-digital library—in this case, the “book-free” (revealing term) public library opened in 2013 in San Antonio, Texas—does not like what he sees. Among the very pertinent remarks made by Adam Feldman are:
Digital evangelism has lulled many of us into what I think ought to be an embarrassingly anti-intellectual comfort zone. Some comfortable folks among us are coming to believe that everything we need to know about the world can be skimmed in a compulsively reloaded feed, algorithmed, and tailored to all our narrow biases. It is a mistake to assume that because of all of the reading on screens that we do these days that libraries are undergoing some sort of seismic shift.
Run by a fraction of the staff necessary for a brick-and-mortar library, our e-book collections of pulp genre fiction and best-sellers steadily rank among our busiest branches when you count “circulation” statistics. The popularity of pulp is nothing new—leisure reading has long been an important part of library land—yet the complex webs of intellectual property law and vendor contracts guarantee that this “e-branch” is a pale shadow of the spectrum of human publishing represented by a real-life library curated by librarians who know their communities. The digital revolution is changing us but not in the way people who don’t use libraries think it is. The meaningful life-changing core of the neighborhood branch is and remains the radical, flexible, dynamic education model that librarians build using every digital, physical, and human resource at hand. We are a cradle-to-grave people’s pre-school through Ph.D.8
Beyond the general arguments and the specific charges leveled by Feldman lies the Law of Unintended Consequences. The postwar history of California is the classic instance of that law. Did those who boosted the development of Southern California really intend to destroy an agrarian way of life, pollute the air and water, create a strip-mall automotive culture, destroy the river systems, and go far to injure the very characteristics that led millions to move to the Golden State? Similarly, will the ease of digital communication blind its advocates to the possibilities of the loss of substantial parts of the human record in an age of all-digital libraries, and the creation of a world that has abandoned learning and is pervaded by trivia, isolation, and anomie?
What would the world be like if all libraries as we know them now were to be replaced by all-digital libraries? It will be like this or may already have turned into this:
• The buildings we now call libraries will be demolished or turned into indoor markets, skateboarding rinks, homeless shelters, or any of the other purposes to which they could be adapted.
• Most of the books and other printed items in research libraries will be transferred to huge warehouses (one copy of each title only) scattered across the nation; will be handed over to giant commercial concerns with no interest in the perpetuation of the human record to be digitized and pulped; or will simply be discarded.
• The stocks of other libraries will be pulped or burned or given to Third World countries.
• Attempts to digitize a respectable percentage of the recorded knowledge and information found in print and to make the fruits of that digitization widely available will continue to run into copyright, technical, societal, educational, and funding problems that will prove to be insurmountable.
• Most publishers of books and magazines will go out of business. Those that remain will publish small runs of hand-printed items for a small population of hobbyist readers; or large runs of trashy magazines, pornography, and comic books for a dwindling, aging readership.
• Scholarly journals will be replaced by a clearinghouse system for articles, run by a consortium of universities.
• The growing number of commercial “virtual universities” and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the end of the tenure system in real universities will mean that fewer articles are handled by the clearinghouse system each year but that there will be a greater traffic between (mostly elderly) scholars in invisible colleges, thus resembling scholarly communication in the eighteenth century (see below).
• Fewer and fewer people will engage in sustained reading of long, complex texts. Most people will content themselves with reading brief texts from smartphone screens.
• The vast majority of young people will be functionally literate, if they can read at all, and easy prey to the commercial, political, and societal manipulation that will sugar-bomb them constantly.
These predictions may seem unduly pessimistic. They are, however, merely the logical extensions of some of the facts and trends we see today projected into an all-digital future, and of the economic and social consequences of a massive move from a print culture to a digital culture.
In August 2014, Karen Calhoun, the author of a book on digital libraries9 asked some colleagues to send her one sentence each on digital libraries.10 Predictably, the results consist of bromides about “conscious coordination of strategic actions” and the like, and blithe generalizations about digital libraries being “built with the needs and practices of end users (rather than librarians) in mind.”11 However, one of the sentences (from R. David Lankes) was well worth pondering (ignore the curious syntax):
You can see the development of digital libraries from collections of stuff to communities of interest.12
“Collections of stuff” is an odd way to refer to the human record. Also, without any “stuff,” what exactly are the communities of interest supposed to be interested in? One assumes that Mr. Lankes is referring primarily to books and other tangible carriers of knowledge and information as “stuff.” Is their despised “stuff-ness” transformed when the texts in the “stuff” exist in digital form? “Communities of interest” (stamp collectors? ornithologists? videogamers?) may or may not be good things, but unless they come together around interaction with the human record, they most certainly do not constitute a library. In this kind of vision, libraries are the Cheshire cats of the twenty-first century, slowly fading away until nothing is left but the regretful smile that acknowledges the loss of what was.
In the all-digital future, public and school libraries would cease to exist. In poor communities, they would, with luck, be replaced by communal online centers. University libraries as we know them would cease to exist. The world of academia will be one in which most students and faculty interact only with digital resources and with each other at a distance. Almost all teaching and learning will be reduced to online job-specific learning. The collections of all these libraries will have to be dispersed, resulting from lack of use and interest. The sight of universities and colleges ridding themselves of collections that took lifetimes of work and hundreds of millions of dollars to build might be distressing at first, but would become commonplace and easily ignored. Keeping even one copy of each title in a warehouse would be quite expensive, and the future of those warehouses would be problematic as the habit of sustained reading gradually dies. It is likely that major parts of the human record would be lost to posterity. If you think this is an extreme prediction, just consider that even librarians in major research libraries are in the habit of referring to “legacy collections.” If a chilling phrase like that comes readily to the lips of a librarian, imagine how little others of power and influence think of book collections and how readily they will dispose of them.
The future of scholarly communication in the form of articles is even cloudier than that of other library materials. The great majority of digital journals, newspapers, and so forth that exist today are by-products of the print publishing industry. They are available to us—and only available to us—because the companies and institutions that produce them make money by selling the print issues. There are many online-only journals and magazines, most of which are subsidized by not-for-profit bodies or run at a loss. It is hard to envision an economic model that would support a profitable digital journal publishing industry. Witness the frantic efforts of serial publishing companies to impose “firewalls” on a public that, increasingly, thinks that everything online should be “free” and turns its collective back on texts and “information” for which they have to pay.
The journal as a form of scholarly communication was born in eighteenth-century Britain as a means of disseminating interesting findings in many fields (natural history, philosophy, etc.) among a small group of wealthy polymaths. Its evolution into today’s massive apparatus of micro-specializations is wearisomely familiar, as is the burden that apparatus has imposed on academic libraries. Many librarians are salivating at the prospect of seeing the back of the scholarly journal, but they may be rejoicing too soon. If the print journal were to die, there is no evidence whatever that it would be replaced by some orderly, economically feasible system of digital dissemination. I think it is quite plausible that the twenty-first century will see something like the eighteenth century, only viewed through a glass darkly. Economics are paramount, but possible changes in academia may have just as great an effect. If the print journal industry collapsed, many of today’s digital journals would vanish (because they are by-products, not autonomous publications). The rise of proprietary “universities,” the slow death of liberal education, and the erosion of the tenure system will probably cause the number of published articles to decline by more than 90 percent. What would remain? To begin with, remaining scholars in the “poor” disciplines will form digitally linked “invisible colleges,” in which they will exchange articles, much as eighteenth-century scholars wrote for journals and exchanged lengthy learned letters with their peers. There might be some money to be made in the “rich” disciplines, in which case the monied scientific, medical, and technical communities will evolve a new type of exchange of research results based on fees and purchase. If you think that academia is isolated from society now, just wait until the time when a few scholars in the liberal arts and sciences communicate only with each other, and scientists, technologists, and medical people sell their research results to megacompanies in a system in which the sole and ultimate value is profit.
The online world is a world of graphics, short texts, videos, and sound recordings. Anyone whose intellectual life is predicated on online interaction will give up on the sustained reading of complex texts, because true literacy (as opposed to functional literacy) will be an unnecessary skill. Sustained reading will be a habit of a dwindling few and, eventually, a lost art. Is there anyone who thinks that the world will be better off when reading is infrequent and devoted only to short bites of microtexts?
I suppose a few librarians might be gainfully employed in a world of all-digital libraries. It is difficult to see much more than that. After all, most of our skills and abilities either will not apply or will not be valued. When the libraries are closed and all their former users are existing online and settling for anything that a search engine can find for them, what could a librarian do to help? It is not just that our unique skills—bibliographic control, collection development, reference work, and so on—would not apply. Even our values—service, intellectual freedom, and the like—would not apply. It is tragic to think the great enterprises of learning, human progress, and the betterment of society would be irrelevant in a world of images and thought bites, a world in which human society regresses to the point at which it consists of isolated individuals living bemused, intellectually stunted lives in the digital equivalent of the caves of Lascaux.
. . . is that it will not happen! It will not happen because humanity is, in the end, both practical and idealistic. We will keep and cherish all the forms of communication (including the book) that we have now because they are useful and because they work. Learning and scholarship and libraries will continue because human beings value them for their own sakes and because they make life and society better. We will continue to incorporate digital technology into our libraries and lives for practical reasons and because, rightly used, that technology can enhance real libraries and bring illumination and pleasure to individual lives and to society.
I believe libraries are valued by many different and influential sectors of society. That esteem and positive valuation may be more latent than overt, but it is there—and we need to capitalize on it. The positive result of the generally negative fact that libraries and other educational institutions are in a constant battle for funding is that it has forced those seeking to increase funding for public services (including librarians and friends of libraries) to work to obtain funding and to bring out the vote for bonds and the like. The votes and the people who value libraries are there—they just need to be informed, courted, and energized. The time has gone, if it ever was, when we could be confident that our libraries and their funding would be supported without question. The lesson is that we all have to work in formal and informal ways to increase and maintain support for libraries among as many people and groups as we can. We certainly should not shrink from modern persuasive techniques—advertising, public relations, and so on—or from locating and tapping alternative sources of funding. The truth about real and all-digital libraries is one of the vital things that we should explain to the wider world. We have a lot to combat. For example, it is astonishing to me that many educated people still swallow the virtual hype and, without any malice toward libraries and learning, assume that “the book” is dying or already dead.
We should begin with our natural supporters: the middle-aged and old people, parents, teachers and faculty, students, scholars and researchers, education- and literacy-minded politicians (not all of whom are progressive in other areas of public policy), and general users of libraries. Securing your base is a political axiom, but so is the idea that you cannot win with only the base on your side. That means that libraries, individually and collectively, need to identify other groups that might not be thought of as library supporters, especially those with money and influence. Though we may wish it were not, library funding is a political issue and one that needs to be addressed as such. That includes the dissemination and clarification of the positive image of the library and the countering and obliteration of any negative images. For example, how many people on a university campus realize that, 99 percent of the time, the library is the—or one of the—most technologically advanced units in the academy? Have people who still see libraries as hushed, repressive places even been in a children’s or college library lately? Do most people realize the depth and breadth of the collections held by major city public libraries?
There has been a lot of discussion and writing about the importance of advocacy for libraries. In recent years, the American Library Association established an Office for Library Advocacy, which has accomplished much in this area.13 Advocacy, in this context, means organized, continuing discussion of the value of libraries (particularly as a source of access to digital resources) and pressure on politicians to maintain and increase library funding. My belief is that this advocacy is best done by individuals and by local and regional library groupings, rather than by national associations of librarians, though the latter can greatly assist local efforts. However it is done, libraries have a compelling story, and librarians have a duty to tell that story. This is particularly true in this time, in which the implicitly antilibrary exaggerations of technophiles too often go unanswered. We must use all possible means of communication and all possible political strategies to tell our story and assert our value.
The public’s perception of the value of libraries is tied, to a great extent, to their perception of the library as place . . .
1. Dillon, Dennis. “Why libraries persist.” Journal of library administration, volume 51 (2011) pages 18–36.
2. Lerner, Fred. The story of libraries. New York: Continuum, 1998. page 138.
3. See the idea of the “digital library” in: Buckland, Michael. Redesigning library services: a manifesto. Chicago: ALA, 1992.
4. Guédon, Jean-Claude. “The virtual library: an oxymoron?” (1998 Leiter Lecture, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, May 1998.) Bulletin of the medical library association, volume 81, number 1 (January 1999). http://blueline.mlanet.org/publications/old/leiter98.html (consulted August 13, 2015).
5. Ibid.
6. Martell, Charles. “Going, going, gone.” Journal of academic librarianship, volume 25, number 3 (May 1999) pages 224–225.
7. See, for example: Odlyzko, Andrew. “Silicon dreams and silicon bricks.” Library trends, volume 46, number 1 (Summer 1997) pages 152–167.
8. Feldman, Adam. “This librarian is not impressed by your digital, no books library.” Next city, August 2014. http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/computers-libraries-no-book-libraries-ebooks (consulted August 14, 2014).
9. Calhoun, Karen. Exploring digital libraries: foundations, practice, prospects. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2014.
10. See “10 thoughts on digital libraries: where they’re going.” CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/news/10-thoughts-digital-libraries-where-theyre-going (consulted August 16, 2014).
11. A nifty example of the kind of malignant use of straw men to attack real libraries. As if those librarians have not had the needs of users (end or otherwise) paramount in their planning and can only be rescued from their wicked ways by being abolished.
12. “10 thoughts on digital libraries.”
13. ALA Office for Library Advocacy (OLA). www.ala.org/offices/ola (consulted August 14, 2014).