I grew up being an avid reader of physical books from my local library, and am now an avid reader of ebooks who uses my local library as a coworking space + community event venue and occasionally still checks out books. I would really love to have the best of both works, but in terms of my current needs the change has been in the right direction.
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.
While I agree libraries, as so many institutions, can be unbelievably archaic in their retrieval & search logistics, imho it seems, to the contrary of what I think you mean to imply, to make total sense for libs to more (i) go into providing providing some escape room from distraction (as you also point out), all while (ii) not becoming more ambitious in terms of trying to have more physical books, now that it's clearer than ever before that the offer of writings is so vast that having a physical copy of most pieces of interest is simply illusory.
I guess there's only so many people who'd benefit exactly from an x-times larger (or acc. to your taste 'better') selection of books to randomly wait in the shelves; if 'visually stumbling upon books' was so much a point for many, then we'd probably have more apps on our screens that provide this. Actually yes people seem to like stumbling into content, so we have TikTok, and Youtube also going into that direction, but turns out for most people that's less about finding books to read but some other media instead, even if there are of course bookshops who do offer also exactly that and make their living from it.
I did stumble upon for me hugely important books in libraries in an ancient past, but I nowadays it seems hugely more efficient to roam online in the right places to get hints about what could interest me to read than randomly gloss at book covers.
From a public perspective, libraries probably are making good choices. From my personal, selfish perspective, they're not. Does that clear things up?
Also, I have noticed going to libraries results in sampling from a different distribution of books. The boredom forcing me to read stuff I usually wouldn't is a part of it, as is the fact I'm not self-selecting into niche scenes which recommend a narrow slice of books.
From a public perspective, libraries probably are making good choices. From my personal, selfish perspective, they're not. Does that clear things up?
It does! Questions (for my taste) then a bit the wording of the title (as well as potentially the case for the frontpage classification as opposed to personal blogpost, though of course that'd not be your 'fault')
Have you noticed how libraries have fewer books in recent years? [1] Bookshelves are placed further apart with more computers, desks, and empty spaces for events. I think it's obvious why. People don't read as much as they used to.
So local governments repurpose libraries to serve other roles in their capacity of public spaces. They're a place to go study, use a public computer, or even have events. And God, the chatter I hear in libraries nowadays. Sometimes I think I'm in a café.
This even extends to the greatest libraries in the world. A while back, I had occasion to go to the British Library. "Get free access to 170 million items" - what book lover could possibly resist those words? Not I.
You know what I saw when I got there? Substantially fewer than 170 million books. I'd wager there wasn't even a tenth of that. Most of their collection is stored off-site, and to browse them, you have to book the items days in advance.
And there were other problems, too. The noise, as mentioned before. The inability to take books out of the library. Badly designed software that doesn't let you filter for books that are on site. 90% of the books on site require you to request an inept librarian to spend an hour fetching them. And the mislabelled shelves, which might say they contain books with Dewey decimal indices from 530.11 to 558.01, but really contain books with indices from 490.07 to 518.02.
Worse yet, they had no taste. I'd gone there in the hopes of getting my hands on the full Landau and Lifshitz collection to have a browse. Not a single item could be found on site. Even a mid-grade university's physics department would have a full collection. And no Arnold, no Thorne, no Weinberg. Is this what Great Britain has come to? Truly, a land lacking abundance.
And yet, I still endorse going to libraries. [2] For one, they encourage boredom. A prettier way of saying this is that they remove attention-grabbing stimuli. But boredom is good, actually. If you're not bored, you are less likely to try new things.
And libraries have a lot of new books for me to try. I've found a bunch of good books this way. For example, I found an art book on fractals by a physicist, which was both beautiful and insightful. E.g. it outlined some methods for creating programs to generate a given fractal, alongside descriptions of pre-1900s Japanese print artists using simplified fractal-generating algorithms to paint mountains. Or a history of science by Steven Weinberg, a biography of Maynard Keynes, a textbook on projective geometry etc.
Some of these, I had intended to read but forgotten about. Some, I'd never hear of. And some, I never imagined I'd be interested in.
And even if you don't find anything to read, the books can serve as inspirations for what you do want to read. E.g. reading the Born-Einstein letters made me want to read more on Einstein.
You can, of course, use the boredom in other ways. To focus deeply on something or to give yourself a place to think in peace. Or just to take a break from attention-grabbing stimuli. It's why I rarely use computers at the library.
But then, the shift in context of working in a library helps me use computers more productively. Which is another plus.
Not all libraries are equal. Some, as mentioned, contain too much chatter. Or too few books. Or bizarre failures in labelling. So what do? There are a couple of options. One, just trawl through Google Maps for libraries in your area and look at the images to estimate the number of books. Two, search online about libraries in your area. Three, there's probably a forum somewhere about good libraries to go to. Four, maybe break into a university library. Surely some of them have loose enough security to let you in, and tight enough security to keep the riff-raff out.
However, we've got off-topic from the most important point. I go to libraries to read books, dang it. I demand more books. So many books, they have to make space by building the bookshelves out of books.
[1] Maybe you haven't noticed this, because you live in an enlightened country. Maybe it is only here that this sacrilege has occurred. Maybe I've doxed myself. But in 1-3 years when we automate Rainbolt, everyone will be doxed.
[2] More on the margin, for all advice is on the margin. The optimal level of anything is not zero. Unless you live in a country where libraries are full of fentanyl addicts, in which case, go live in a civilized country.