I think this is highly dependent on the school, coursework, and major. I graduated not so long ago, I certainly took courses where I absolutely had to find written records or books as part of the class, especially things that were in the special collections of the library, I’m talking things for history or classics courses. I was a Physics and Math major, mind you, but still had lots of other higher level coursework outside my major in various other liberal arts. One of my roommates was a Classics major. He lived in the archival part of our campus library.

I get what you are saying, though.

How did Covid change those experiences for you? Was finding physical documents still the expectation?

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Covid was way after I was in college. But I can’t imagine taking a course in civil war history and not being expected to read and cite direct sources available only at the institutions library.

You may be right about physical books, but not about libraries and librarians. Students don't intuitively know how access scholarly databases and do research. Librarians provide guidance on doing academic research and libraries are where that happens. If you think local public libraries are an adequate substitute for a college campus library, you're clueless. For one thing, they're unlikely to have pertinent resources for the subject matter taught at the college. They're also often far from campus and, more importantly, their hours are extremely limited and unlikely to be open evenings and weekends when students need them most.

Im sorry I’m trying to word this without coming off as a jerk, but with all due respect I think your college experience is entirely different in this respect from anything present day college students face. I wrote a research paper last year on clashes between colonists and natives in the Appalachians. Using the websites of Northeastern’s library, the Boston Public Library, and the Library of Congress, I had 10 primary sources in 30 minutes and my paper done in a day’s work.

Covid definitely fundamentally changed the way information is accessed for a multitude of purposes, academics included.

Would you mind sending me a university library website that I can search through? I can have whatever you want me to find in 10 minutes.

There are computers at these libraries that offered many people their only access to the internet, you absolute dingus brain.

Librarians also do a whole lot more than put books on shelves. I know someone who works as a librarian at a school in CT and she teaches all the research classes. Online research classes. On computers. In the library.

Who do you think creates and maintains university websites?

Not doubting that in any way, but I’m not sure how that makes any difference? I mean those documents came from somewhere? Someone has to archive and upload them, correct? Some institutions have rare or unique documents or texts, where do they go? Maintaining and staffing a library is not anywhere close to a major line item at most colleges and universities. Hell, the small town I went to school in, half the town used the college library for books, music, and DVDs as it was ten times better than anything in the county.

Ours are done by students on work study, computer code, and recently some AI

They aren’t closing the spaces, they’re “eliminating all physical resources in the university’s libraries and transitioning to a digital-only library,” and redistributing “books, collections and other materials” per VTdigger. The spaces still exist, so will the internet connection inside of them.

Online research classes is a very important part of a high school curriculum, but no college student needs help researching information online.

Our university was digitized by students on work study, and is maintained by students, computer code, and some AI as of recently. Larger databases like the BPL and library of Congress are maintained with professionals using taxpayer funds and are free to access for all.

As for the music and DVD’s, it’s streaming services or pirating, anything you’re interested in is available on your smartphone or laptop.

Is your school even accredited?

We’re a top 50 school nationally lmao

US News page on Northeastern University

>no college student needs help researching information online.

As somebody who worked over a decade in higher ed and now works in a high school, I can assure you you're wrong here.

Over your time in higher Ed, do you see a trend of students who grew up with the internet being more intuitive at operating it as opposed to those who learned it later in life? For example if I didn’t know how to use an online library, I wouldn’t ask a person for help, I’d google how to use an online library, find a YouTube video or website explaining the general search process and what the terms mean, then I’d use an online library.

So what do all these librarians do then?

https://library.northeastern.edu/administration/library-staff-directory/

Teach the students and help build the code and AI that maintains the library. I know a few of those have relationships with google where a few friends have gone to work right out of college.

Edit to clarify: Everyone on that list is involved with research projects in some form, teaches in some form, or involved with another association or company.

Worst take. Libraries are a part of preserving culture and civilization. Books are precious, knowledge is precious. Never minimize the library.

I love my local libraries, and I completely agree

I wish I could upvote you a thousand times. Even if something is online that is the result of careful curation by somebody trained in this. It should not be devalued. If everybody shutters the library best believe online resources suffer terribly.

ChatGPT (with its fake citations!) will only make this worse

I was an English major and I never took out a physical book in my entire 5 years. The online library was so much more convenient.

Especially if you’re anywhere near as lazy as I am!

You’re gonna hurt Castleton’s feelings saying UVM is the only public university.

Castleton is VSC lol

>…and not have UVM be the only public option for higher education.

You seem quite self-sufficient. And, frankly, quite self-absorbed. While you may be very adept at learning skills on your own, it seems you're oblivious to the fact that everyone learns differently. Northeastern seems to have a robust library system, and it doesn't appear to be closing. In fact, their calendar of events includes workshops on using library resources. Imagine that. A library teaching people how to do research. People are not going to pay tuition for websites written by work-studies and AI. You started this thread saying it would be an unpopular take. I think, intuitively, you knew why that would be the case.

EDITED for typo

I said we need to invest in VSC so it’s not just UVM as the lone higher Ed option

What do you think VSC is, if not a group of 16-ish Universities and Colleges of which UVM is not a member? Besides, for a state of 650k people total systems that handle 22K are more than adequate.

This is an incredibly foolish and short sighted take, not to mention the fact that research is infinitely more pleasurable with physical books.

As someone who spent 13.5 as a reference librarian in the VSC until fairly recently I very much disagree, but you're entitled to your opinion.

In my experience art and photography people definitely wanted books. Some majors tend more towards journal articles, but many still relevant articles are in books that are not available online.

Wow. Tell me you're an entitled twat without saying it.

Just yesterday there was someone here saying how they graduated college and have a career, but it turns out they couldn't figure out how to find apartment listings online. Your faith in your fellow students is highly misguided.

>oblivious to the fact that everyone learns differently

That myth has been proven to be incorrect and quite damaging to student learning. You self-righteous a-hole.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/learning-styles-myth-damaging-our-education-system

https://blogs.bsu.edu/teaching-innovation/2023/02/01/what-we-can-learn-from-the-learning-styles-myth/

I guarantee you. Not by librarians.

EVERYONE on that list is a librarian

While I agree with the science on learning styles, it's pretty clear from context that (while they may not have used the best phrasing) the previous commenter is getting at the fact that different people, even of the same generation, have different knowledge bases and skills.

Trends aside, even Gen-Zers didn't pop out of the womb being great at scholarly internet research. Even though OP is a self-proclaimed master of it, many of their coursemates may not be depending on their experiences.

This is dinosaur think. If you need it it’s online. There is no way the LSC library archives have anything that the world needs that isn’t digital. There may be some local history stuff in the old Fiche files, but I was a history major at Lyndon 15 years ago and NEVER used the library for anything other than library of Congress book exchange, and that was 15 years ago when eBooks were just starting out. I could at the time get primary sources online in almost every case I needed them. The last 20 years of you and I solving captchas to verify we are not computers has allowed digitization of countless primary sources.

Last point is that we are talking about LSC, JSC, and VTC. This isn’t Harvard or Yale where their may be donated collections of important things that may only exist in that place.

As a mid 30s person, it amazes me the number of dinosaurs on this REDDIT. Like I feel like I’m on the old side of acceptable Reddit users, but these people are arguing that college students need to be taught to use computers.

What the hell is the first 13 years of public education doing if it’s not teaching them that? I know in 2001 I was taking classes on how to use computers in HS, shit in 1998 we were learning to research online in 6th grade. By the time I got to college I had experience with Jstor and other scholarly journals, and utilizing things like LOC and the NYT archives.

Kids these days are born with tech in hand. My niece could find her cartoons on an iPad before she could form a full sentence and read.

I was probably on the early side of the no text book thing, I refused to buy them when I was at Lyndon, getting stuff I needed in digital form successfully most of the time. But as I progressed in my history and poli sci studies I never felt like I was struggling to get sources or access info.

Once a doc is digital it doesn’t need any maintenance, and anything that has value to society has been digitized in the last 40 years.

I worked in IT for a dozen years at two small Vermont colleges. I don't accept your guarantee. At both colleges, the librarians were deeply involved in the maintenance of and responsibility for the library websites. They worked collaboratively with IT for the technical aspects, but had full authority over the content.

This isn't a great take because keep in mind college libraries also give you access to digital books paid paywalled research materials that are necessary for for coursework

Also like I too never bought all the books that were required and preferred digital. But even like 5 years ago when I was in college some professors required physical books. Guess where I got the books when I was required to show up in class with them?

On the counterpoint even like 5 years ago I had some professors require bringing physical books to class. Guess where I got the books from when I needed them.

Im sure the librarians still spearheaded this. Since like you know. They are professionally trained in doing it.

Would you want 18 year old work study students uploading and categorizating rare priceless documents without any sort of oversight?

Also asking college students to pirate for their research? Thats not a good idea. You can usually get the needed materials through the library

Good luck finding embargoed articles or dissertations without using a librarian or interlibrary loan. Sci-hub, LibGen, etc. don't contain everything. School accreditation in the area places a heavy emphasis on information literacy and the primary conduit for information literacy learning assessment is via libraries.

They don't need to be taught how to use computers. But when it comes to navigating an institutions internal library, yeah people need help with that. Its not always easy.

I work with graduate students regularly that have no idea how to search online let alone navigate a database or use boolean operators. Don't assume everyone has your skills.

You do know that the organizing structure of a library is a science and people go to school for it right? They spend countless hours categorizing and sorting through internal materials so they have a library that makes sense. Even digitally.

Using the google and doing scholarly research withing an internal system are also like completely different skillsets. Something tells me that since op doesn't understand the importance of a librarian in even an online database. That he isn't really that good at doing scholarly research. In another comment he claims his school uses "AI" instead of librarians

Go to Snell Library some time. There are half a million print volumes there. Northeastern also benefits from being part of the Boston Library Consortium and sharing print collections with a number of other high-profile libraries.

If you don’t know that your university library has print books, you’re not doing a great job at college. Or your college is failing you and you’re paying way too much.

Given your ignorance of this very basic fact, why would I take anything else you say seriously?

What are they going to do with all the books???

It's not that I necessarily disagree with you, but I have a hunch that there is bigger fat that could be trimmed before physical library books.

They're also laying off an unknown amount of staff. As the parent to a college student who worked several years in a campus library, that work-study money was essential. And, I will say that most of her time was spent helping students find information. Not every student had online researching mastered and were not afraid to ask for help.

From Northeastern University's library website: "Resources include close to 500,000 print volumes..."

Just because you didn't use print books doesn't mean that they don't exist and that they aren't being used by others. And no, not every book is digitized and available.

In other comments you talk about how you are smart enough to do your own research therfore librarians aren't needed. yet you cant find the library portal for your own college.

🤔

I think it’s a bit of a skewed statistic to say that your 12 friends who have only been in school during the height of Covid lockdowns and remote learning have never used a physical library and then project that to the whole student body and say that that is normal. While I personally did not use the physical library much at Castleton, many (more than 12…) of my classmates did on a regular basis.

At age 62, I can remember when there were no digital resources in the library. My children are in college and I rarely see them with a book. Although they are able to access a great deal of information online (without a great deal of effort, I might add), their laptop computers don't allow them to see very much of it at one time. When I was a college student, I'd have at least 6 books open at once when I was writing a paper—like having 6 computer screens to look at. It's not the same when you have that many browser tabs to switch back and forth between (I know because I am now a professional writer). I also find that my children don't search as widely as we used to when researching a subject. They'll use the first couple of pages of internet search results and call it a day. When you're browsing in the stacks of a physical library, you come across things that wouldn't even make it onto page 10 of your search results. A book by a small publisher, some other student's dissertation, and so on. I also remember the pleasure of handling the volumes themselves. Paper from the Soviet Union had a particular smell (a good one). Early 20th century book bindings from Germany were extraordinarily crafted, like art objects. And when I wanted to free myself of distractions, I would decamp to the Chinese literature section, where I could not read anything at all. I don't miss having to type up my work from handwritten manuscripts, often cut up and taped back together as part of the editing process. But I do have wonderful memories of the books I learned from, all those pages turned by the students who had gone before me.

And yet, I had to buy books for classes every semester. Many I never opened but were still required.

The Northeastern University Library serves the entire Northeastern community—in Boston, across the global campus network, and online. The Library provides collections and services supporting research and teaching across disciplines. Its collections are extensive, with a large proportion available digitally. The Library's collections include 1,191,788 e-books; 483,844 print titles; 162,640 licensed e-journals; and 223,659 streaming audio and visual titles. Access to print and electronic materials is provided through Scholar OneSearch, the Library's discovery platform. The Library's Archives and Special Collections hold historical records and publications of Northeastern and unique materials preserving the history of Boston's social movements, public infrastructure, neighborhoods, and natural environments.

I read this and thought "Burn them!" haha.

Jokes aside, your question is central. Archiving texts for later reference is what a library is for after all. If we don't intend to destroy the books, don't you suppose they're better kept in a catalogued library than dispersed to the winds? What a shame it'd be to destroy books because they take up space.

"Administrative costs" come to mind for me

I got a laugh out of your strategy of using the Chinese literature section to avoid distraction! And, I can relate to your feeling of flipping through pages seeing the annotations and dog-ears of generations of students prior. Many of my peers love paper volumes at school for exactly the reasons you mention

Thanks for sharing your take. It may be unpopular, but I think your concerns are legit. Keep in mind that many students have a much different relationship with paper volumes.

…did you just ask if Northeastern was accredited ?

They accepted something like 400 people out of 90,000 applicants for their undergrad this year. It’s one of the best schools on the planet.

Dude, the OP said "ours [library websites] are [created and maintained] by students on work study, computer code, and recently some AI." Without knowing where the OP went to school, I asked if it was accredited based on his clearly inaccurate assertion about who manages the library web content. I have no doubt Northeastern is accredited and their library is above reproach. I'll bet the lives of my children that their website is not managed by work study students.

They said Northeastern in the post

Those that learned it later in life? The internet as we know it has been around since the early 90s and librarians in their 40s and 50s grew up with it. I'm only in my early 40s and was on BBS's in the late 80s. Prior to' 94 databases were housed on floppy disks and CDs. The literature and testing has shown that Millennials and GenZ are actually worse at research online because they lack basic information literacy skills. I teach information literacy to grad students in their 20s that have never heard about boolean operators, truncation, etc. They have no idea how to utilize the CRAAP test or how to access databases. Google has made people intellectually lazy, meanwhile we in the information science field are the ones that write and know how to navigate the metadata. It takes a master's degree to become an academic librarian for a reason.

I do know that since I work in a library.

Right but institutions don’t need libraries that’s the whole point. LSC doesn’t need a collection. JSC doesn’t need a collection. There is nothing in these libraries that can’t be found online, and when I was student teaching 15 years ago we were teaching 9th graders how to research, including accessing scholarly sites and collections. So yes at some point people need to be taught, but that is a middle and high school task. They should get to college knowing how to find sources.

So they did. I must've blown past it. They also said, "we’ve never had books in our library (or any other public spaces) since I’ve been here." But the web site says, "Resources include close to 500,000 print volumes." I'll take your word that the university accepts 400 out of 90,000, but the OP is really one in a million.

How is this different than making the argument about online universities in general. Why pay for sports, why have gyms, why have food service, etc. I used the library whenever I did research for papers, and not all documents are available online. I feel like you rather than making a critique about libraries specifically your real argument is about the utility of services a college provides and need for said services. IMO, this argument is a fast track to privatization and gatekeeping what otherwise would be considered a public asset.

You're just like the OP. Another clueless twit pretending to be an expert on something they know little about.

When I went to UVM, we still used books. They probably still do (the Howe Library).

OP's "argument" (if you can call it that) is wishful thinking.

Yeah and they should start with eliminating "administrative redundancy" (more Vice Presidents than you can shake a stick at).

When I was at UVM, the librarian often taught classes on how to use the resources. Librarians are valuable, contrary to what book-burners think.

For someone that went to college, you seem to be pulling things out of your ass and presenting them as fact. College students absolutely need helping finding information, especially with all of the DIS-information out there.

How does this post contribute to the discussion? You can't expect kids to know everything right out of the gate.

Millennial here. I'm familiar with all of that. This generation-bashing has got to stop unless Gen X is prepared to have it thrown back in their faces. After all, they were the generation that were guinea pigs for kidnappings, lead poisoning and preventable deaths.

not everything is digitized. There's a lot of information, special collections or otherwise, that isn't on digital databases yet. It's still in physical copies. My college library had a large online selection but it also had a sizeable physical collection, because not everything was digitized. I used physical books for research throughout my entire time in college, as did plenty of others at my school, and I only graduated last year

I'm a UVM student and the Howe Library has a ton of books everywhere.

I’m actually a VSC student, and 1. There are absolutely people who still need help with online research, and library staff are an incredibly valuable resource for that 2. The books in the libraries here are amazing, and the leadership has zero business throwing them out. Not to mention, the library is basically the only thing to do or go to on some campuses.

Some public schools still can't afford that education. Yes, now. Yes, still.

Poverty is still real!

So, English is the only language, right? English-language resources are the only ones that matter. You don't know anyone studying a field with the majority of work done in a non-English language, and you don't care to know them, and you don't care to know how they research and what they need.

Damn, kid!

These libraries serve the state, not just the campuses. Sit-in at CU 9;30 Monday. Protests are also scheduled.