I'm a librarian and while I sympathize with some of the arguments here, they are not arguments I can explain to the public. No one cares, and they shouldn't have to. They should be able to read everything from James Patterson to Thomas Piketty and not have to think about it and Libby is pretty good at enabling that. Alternative platform exist, but none of them are as good. Libby works on a lot of devices and Overdrive works with Amazon for people who own a Kindle. More people check out e-books and fewer check out physical books every year; the pubic wants what it wants and right or not Overdrive is the best way to get them that.
So yeah, this could come crashing down. But more likely it will be like the transition of any format. Audiobooks have moved from tapes to CDs to digital in the span of about 15 years (in 2007 we still had lots of tape audiobooks) so we tossed the tapes and bought CDs because people got rid of their tape players and then did the same with CDs. We didn't dig in our heels and tell people tape players were good enough because it's not a luxury we have.
Does a library have no duty of preservation or archival? Surely "what the public wants" cannot be the only driving factor, right?
If the public wanted a building filled with nothing but adult magazines, or nothing but gardening books, would the library not have any choice but to fulfill those narrow desires at the expense of preserving great works of literary art?
> Does a library have no duty of preservation or archival? Surely "what the public wants" cannot be the only driving factor, right?
Yes, it is the only driving factor for a public library.
It turns out people do want to preserve stuff, so we keep an archive of local interest items that the public wants (microfilm, city directories, notable local authors and artists), but we don't view ourselves as an archive. That's not our mission nor are we equipped to do that work beyond the limited capacity we already have.
The same goes for materials in the collection. If they do not check out, we remove them and replace them with things that hopefully will. Years of experience has taught me that people do not want an old collection, no matter what its value. They want current items that are clean and relevant to them and that's what we're here for. We're a government institution and are ultimately answerable to what the public wants.
But here's the thing, like with our local archive, the desires of the public and preservation do often align. That's why libraries look the way they do. People do check out great works of literary art and we often replace those as they wear out. People do want some archival materials and ask for them when doing research. The situation you describe doesn't happen because it turns out most people don't want all gardening books or adult magazines. But we don't keep anything that doesn't get used just for the sake of it, all of it serves the mission.
>Years of experience has taught me that people do not want an old collection, no matter what its value. They want current items that are clean and relevant to them and that's what we're here for.
With all due respect: if this is true, how come it feels like I can never find any recent-ish literature in any given library? be it a rural area or university, I feel like trying to find anything more recent than 20 years old or so just doesn't happen. And technical books evolve quickly.
I think this is a problem specific to your library. A very quick check shows the average age of our collection to be about 6 years (at my small to midsized urban library). That's extremely rough because new editions of classics will show a much more recent copyright date than an average person would consider them, so a collection can still be seen to skew much older than the data suggests. However, it's still dominated by recent titles, especially of popular literature. Technical books are harder for me to comment on because at a public library, that's generally out of our domain. We try to keep up on the popular series for tech stuff like "Learn Visually" or "Dummies", but the circulation or those dwindles as either fewer people need them or are more likely to use the internet for solving their problems. Depending on your needs, you might see if your library has a subscription to O'Reilly books or similar platform for your area of interest.
Public libraries have no such duty, no. Outside of the largest systems, most aren't fit to do this in a way that would materially achieve the goal of preserving anything, either in terms of space, equipment, or expertise.
So generally speaking, providing "what the public wants" is the entire purpose of public libraries. Obviously librarians exercise a lot of discretion about what specifically to buy and make available in the library, but most have long since moved on from paternalistic notions of needing to provide access only to The Great Books.
The library of congress has a duty of archival, but public libraries are there as a service to the public. So, what the public wants from them is actually the only driving factor.
One might posit a phenomenon parallel to enshitification, perhaps deeply tied up in it, which might be called "inshutification": the shrinking of spheres of awareness, responsibility, and influence
So yeah, this could come crashing down. But more likely it will be like the transition of any format. Audiobooks have moved from tapes to CDs to digital in the span of about 15 years (in 2007 we still had lots of tape audiobooks) so we tossed the tapes and bought CDs because people got rid of their tape players and then did the same with CDs. We didn't dig in our heels and tell people tape players were good enough because it's not a luxury we have.