The other day I went to my university’s library to find a book. Since the last time I was there, the staff had begun a large shifting and sorting operation of some kind, and where the science section (Q in the Library of Congress classification) used to be, there were just rows of empty shelves.
I saw a staff person moving some books and asked her what was going on. She said that they were consolidating the collections that used to occupy two floors and putting them all on one floor.
“What’s happening to the extra books that used to fill up both floors?” I asked.
“If something hasn’t been looked at in ten years, we’re moving it to the storage facility off campus. That way the more popular items will still be here, and you can always request an item from storage.”
“I see.” This got me to wondering whether a larger trend was going on.
It is.
If you think of a library as a place where you go to find a book, then get ready for the Library Apocalypse. It will be here sooner than you think, if it hasn’t already arrived at a university library near you.
A 2023 study by the Association of College and Research Libraries1 (ACRL) presents some eye-opening statistics. Its authors surveyed a total of 1,435 primarily U. S. institutions, including 342 doctoral universities, so it’s quite representative of overall trends in academic libraries. For all types of schools except doctoral-granting ones, the vast majority of library holdings are already digital. Less than one out of five held items are physical ones, with two-year and associate-degree colleges having only 5.6 percent of their holdings in physical form. Research (doctoral) institutions are the outliers here, still having 71.6 percent of their items in physical form.
But despite the vast physical-form holdings of research libraries, almost nobody is looking at physical media such as books and printed journals anymore. The highest rate of circulation of physical items, as opposed to digital lookups, is only 3.2 percent for bachelor’s-degree-granting institutions. The average rate for all survey participants shows that only 1.6 percent of total circulation represents physical items. Everything else is bits. Research-university libraries are stuck with huge collections of books and other physical stuff that almost never gets checked out or glanced at. No wonder they’re moving books into storage. Next stop: recycling.
Of course, some libraries can afford to hold onto their rare and unique collections of physical items. Harvard University, for example, maintains an underground off-campus storage facility in Southborough, Mass. where it keeps some nine million or so physical items that can be recalled by request. And on campus, Harvard’s own archives are stored in the Nathan Marsh Pusey library underneath Harvard Yard. With its endowment, Harvard can afford such precautions that make its physical holdings proof against even a nuclear war. But few other university libraries can afford such precautions.
Even without maintaining physical holdings, the move to digital doesn’t come cheap. According to the 2023 survey, doctoral-granting institutions spend almost a third of their budgets on subscriptions, the vast majority of which are digital. That’s a higher percentage of total budget than salaries for their librarians and other professional staff. But if academic libraries are to continue to fulfill their core mission of making knowledge and information available to anyone who asks, they have to go where the information is, and online is increasingly where it’s at.
Writing itself is a technology. As the means of recording information changed from papyrus scrolls to incunabula to microfilm to magnetic-core memories to the internet, libraries have had to change along with the technology. While the technology has changed, what hasn’t changed is the association between the leading edges of advancing civilization and libraries. What is the significance of libraries to modern culture, and in particular to institutes of higher education?
One way to abstract the significance of libraries from the entire history of their role in civilization is to imagine how history might look if there were never any such things as libraries. One particular library comes to mind that we could ill have done without.
It was very small—small enough to fit into a damp cellar owned by a Greek named Neleus of Scepsis and his descendants. It consisted largely of the works of Aristotle—the only extant copies of many of his works—and was hidden in a cellar to keep representatives of the kingdom of Pergamon from confiscating it for the king’s larger library. Neleus’s library remained there, neglected and almost forgotten, for over a hundred years. Around 100 BCE, an Athenian book collector by the name of Apellicon found out about the late Neleus’s scrolls after a change of dynasty ended Pergamon’s interest in library acquisitions. Apellicon bought the library and took it back to Athens, where Aristotle’s works were copied and ultimately survived in various forms and languages until the present. On such thin threads does the history of the West depend, and one of the most important threads runs through a library.
Ordinarily, though, libraries distribute their benefits so diffusely that it is hard to attribute a particular civilizational advance to their presence. And one can argue that not everything libraries do is good. If Karl Marx hadn’t been able to spend his days in the British Library researching materials for the Communist Manifesto, we might well have been spared the advent of communism, at least in the form it took. Marx or no, the rise of the modern research university well before the digital age would have been inconceivable without libraries, which is why until recently one of the standard quality measures of a research university was the size of its library’s physical holdings.
Two factors discernable today threaten the long-term viability of university libraries. One we have already discussed: the ongoing trend away from physical collections to digital ones, with the burden of paying for digital subscriptions while preserving some physical holdings. The second factor’s influence is small but growing, and is presently viewed by librarians as a good thing. But they may have second thoughts if the trend continues. I speak of the current pressures to make increasing numbers of journals, books, and other publications open-access.
The traditional economic structure of academic journals is the subscription model. The publisher recruits authors and editors, virtually all of whom work for journal publishers without pay. The publisher makes journals available to both individuals and libraries, but usually charges the libraries much higher rates, because presumably more people will view library holdings than those accessed by an individual. As the owners of Elsevier and other well-known academic publishers know, the subscription model is highly profitable, and can approach monopolism when certain materials can be obtained from only one publisher, as is often the case.
In recent years, a second economic model for academic publishing has emerged: open access. Open-access publishing shifts the cost of publications from the recipient to the producer, usually the authors. Page charges, sometimes on the order of thousands of dollars per paper, must be paid in order to publish in certain prestigious journals. The situation is exacerbated as some governments are now insisting that all government-funded research be published in open-access forums.
While punitive for underfunded and independent researchers, the open-access model looks initially like good news to libraries: for open-access journals and books, they don’t have to pay ruinous subscription charges that currently eat up a third of their budgets. But open access really is open to everyone. If I know where to look, and AI is standing by to help me figure that out, I can get an open-access paper by myself with only a computer, without having to deal with the library at all. The 2023 academic library survey notes a curious downward trend in average total circulation (print and digital) for that year, down 60 percent from the banner year of 2020 (which saw a spike due to COVID) but down almost as much from 2022. We have lived through the eras that heralded every person becoming his own secretary and every person his own typesetter; we may now be entering the era of every person becoming his own librarian.
Most academics are already used to accessing their university’s library mainly via the internet. But there is still a boundary line around the library, namely your university username and password. Generally, unlimited electronic access to a university library’s collection is restricted to students, faculty, and staff of that university. This gives these people access to journals that still use the subscription model, and an increasing number of e-books that can be checked out in various ways. Most new-book acquisitions these days apparently involve e-books rather than physical books. Access to paid-subscription journals and e-books are two of the most important functions that university libraries still perform. But these expenses differ from purchases of physical books and journals in a critical way.
In a 2025 TEDx talk at Penn State University, Jeff Edmunds, who is that university’s Digital Access Coordinator librarian, explained why every month, thousands of e-book titles vanish from their collection, and every year they are compelled to buy thousands of other e-books that they don’t want. The reasons? In two words, licensing and bundling. In hopes of defending themselves against the possibility that users would make indefinite numbers of copies of electronic books and journals, the rights conferred to users by publishers are never described as ownership. Instead, the user is merely licensed to access the files under certain carefully prescribed conditions, which can (and do) have limits of time and space. E-books resemble objects in fairy tales, in the sense that if a fairy gives you a book, it can magically vanish from your shelf whenever the fairy wants it back. Only the fairy in this case is a corporation such as Elsevier, which according to Edmunds made a $2 billion profit in 2024.
Licensing means an e-book can stay on a library’s virtual shelf only as long as the publisher wants it to. Bundling means that if a library wants access to a particular book or journal, the institution may have to pay for a whole bundle of stuff which happens to contain the item wanted, along with a lot of other things they don’t want or need.
In closing his talk, Edmunds echoed one of the five laws of library science enunciated by S. R. Ranganathan in 1931. Ranganathan, a librarian at the University of Madras, Chennai, India, stated his first law as “Books are for use.” Edmunds closed his talk with the words “Knowledge is a public good, and it must be treated as such.” In protesting against the restrictions and expenses imposed by academic publishing houses, Edmunds proposed Open Educational Resources (OER) as an alternative. Promoted heavily by libraries, OER is a movement which directs students and educators to resources that are basically license-free and often cost-free, except for the expense of an Internet connection. Edmunds clearly wishes that everybody would get on the open-access bandwagon and abandon subscription-mode publishing for open access.
Would this be a good thing? It might be for the general public, but what about libraries? As the remaining physical holdings of academic libraries are digitized and the originals frequently disposed of, and as more digital information is freed up from burdensome subscriptions and other charges to join the open-access world, what will libraries be for? Pushing things to the limit, if I can access any holding of any library in the world from my laptop, and be assisted in these investigations by an AI bot with the combined abilities of a hundred “meat” librarians, why should I leave my room, let alone go to a big building called a library, or bother with a library card, if everything I need is open access?
The last of Ranganathan’s five laws is this: “A library is a growing organism.” Librarians are aware of the trend away from physical media toward digital media that people can often find without the help of a librarian at all. As a result, they have been offering a variety of new activities to keep people coming to libraries: meetings, conferences, makerspaces, and more, not to mention story hours, drag queen or otherwise. Besides circulation figures, the 2023 ACRL report shows the numbers of meetings hosted by academic libraries, both online and in person. Yes, a library is a convenient place to meet, but so is a coffee shop. Maybe that’s why a few years ago, my university’s library remodeled its main floor—which used to be devoted to recent journals and magazines and the checkout desk—to accommodate a huge bank of computer terminals and a Starbucks.
I will ask non-religious persons to excuse the religious comparison, but something seems to be going on in academic libraries that parallels what has gone on in certain mainline denominations that are going the liberal route: a hollowing-out of purpose, so that what used to be a place where you had to go to encounter something special is now no different in principle from a social club, whose members merely share a common interest such as knitting or bridge. Encouraging hobbyists to get together to enjoy their hobbies is not a bad thing. But for the past couple of thousand years, the reason for going to a library was to encounter the thoughts and facts that were judged worthy of preservation for future generations. It’s hard to get that at Starbucks, even if you bring your smartphone with you.
Libraries have always been expensive. That’s why traditionally, only rich people, governments, and kings could afford them. These parties dedicated their libraries to the preservation of what was regarded as most important to a culture, or at least to the people in charge of the culture.
But the digitization of knowledge is doing to the library what it has already done to the file folder. File folders now survive mostly as icons on computer screens, reduced to a symbolic and conceptual repository of documents rather than a physical object. The concept of a file folder is still useful, but the physical thing is vanishing. My university department’s office doesn’t even stock new ones anymore.
The same fate may await the library, whose name derives from the Latin for “book,” by way of libraria, which actually means “bookstore.” While we still have bookstores of a sort, finding physical books in libraries is getting harder all the time. A concerned blogger named Derek Krissoff notes that several university libraries, including West Virginia University and Penn State, have ceased to buy print materials altogether. Libraries may persist as places you can go to get knowledge, but the connection between the name and the contents may become purely symbolic pretty soon.2
When academic libraries consist only of computer terminals and meeting rooms, what will we have lost? After all, presumably everything important will still be available on the internet, at least if you don’t live in Iran, which recently shut down its internet temporarily due to political unrest. Physical libraries that hold books can be closed and locked up, but the books are still there. As Nazi Germany learned to its regret, the burning of books is a slow and inefficient way to eliminate knowledge. The symbolism of book-burning makes good film or video propaganda, but only if you want to be known for your anti-intellectual stance. Generally speaking, totalitarian political regimes are enemies of widespread knowledge access, and therefore of libraries. But if knowledge access is primarily online, it can be turned off with the click of a digital switch—as Iran has recently demonstrated. The burning of an entire library is something that even Iran hasn’t had the temerity to do yet. But if there are no physical books to burn, there is no need to burn libraries. You just recycle them instead, assuring everyone that it will all still be accessible online. That is, until it isn’t.
Perhaps the world, and the world’s universities, will get along just fine when most of the data held by libraries in physical form moves to websites. After all, the first core value listed on the American Library Association’s homepage is “access,” meaning that everyone in a community can get the information they want with a minimum of effort. My pushed-to-the-limit vision of global library content residing totally on the internet and curated by AI bots would realize that value almost perfectly. It would also mean the end of libraries as we know them.
Libraries are not permanent things, but they aspire to permanence. Perhaps the internet and its successor technologies will be with us to the end of time, preserving something in a more secure way than physical paper and ink ever could. Talking about preservation on the internet is close to an oxymoron, because continual effort and resources are required simply to keep a given amount of material online. And despite one’s best efforts, nothing online ever looks exactly the same after a few decades, simply because the technology is continually changing.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that the almost inconceivable sometimes happens. With global population forecasted to be shrinking in absolute terms sometime after 2100, it is difficult to imagine what cultural conditions will prevail. It is entirely possible that a severe shortage of both the will and the technical abilities to keep the internet going could happen.
In that case, we might end up in a digital version of the opening scenes of Walter Miller’s classic 1959 sci-fi dystopia, A Canticle for Leibowitz. In that novel, a nuclear holocaust has wiped out nearly all of civilization, but a few monasteries have preserved enough documents to allow piecemeal reconstruction of primitive technologies, something about the history of the world and other things necessary for cultural memory. A global catastrophe, either natural or man-made, could decimate the internet’s infrastructure to the extent that only localized shreds of it remain, rendering it useless outside those limited regions. The stubbornness of physical books and documents would keep them immune from such a situation, although we’d be back to the pre-internet days of having to go to a library to look something up. It’s better than not having any place to go at all, however.
This dismal fantasy may not be enough of a reason to resist the trend toward all-digital libraries, or whatever they will be called in the future. Perhaps browsing using a web browser is substantially the same as browsing through the now-decimated stacks of real books in the Q section, looking for something I wasn’t sure of except that I’d know it when I saw it. But if we believe Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message, the message that internet-based information sends is that all is in flux, finding the truth is hard if not impossible, and everything is subject to editing or cancellation at any time.
The message that a traditional library full of books sends goes something like the following: There have been generations of people before you, many of them wise enough to have written and published the expensive and troublesome physical artifact known as a book. Most of them are dead, but their words live on in these volumes. It is up to you to decide which of these books to devote precious minutes of your brief lifespan to. But understand there is more here than any one person can hope to fathom in a lifetime. And as long as these books last, they will say the same thing to anyone who asks.
That kind of message is both humbling and trustworthy compared to the internet’s siren song of entertainment and titillation. It looks like we will have to reconcile ourselves to less of the former and more of the latter. But the side effects may not be good.
Karl D. Stephan is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.
1 Association of College & Research Libraries. The State of U.S. Academic Libraries: Findings from the ACRL 2023 Annual Survey, 2024, https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2024-10/2023%20State%20of%20Academic%20Libraries%20Report.pdf
2 Derek Krissoff, “When libraries stop buying books,” June 22, 2024, Substack, https://derekkrissoff.substack.com/p/when-libraries-stop-buying-books
Photo by Baptiste Régnier on Unsplash