Libraries are... (Score 5, Insightful)

"Library" is the word for a an institution providing collectively financed information to a community of users. There is nothing archaic about this idea.

Right now the best way to access scholarly information (in those thousands of academic journals) is through full text databases such as Ebscohost, Proquest, and Infotrac. These databases contain millions of articles. A fraction of a percent of this informaiton is available on the free web. By comparison, the free web looks like crap.

You can not simply pay to use these databases as an individual user, either by subscription or on a pay-per-view basis (though there are a couple of minor exceptions to this). As a rule, access to these databases is through libraries. If you are a student, faculty or staff member at a university, you have access to dozens of these databases through the library. That's right, it's the library that enters into contracts to provide access to these databases to users. (And that access is usually remote, via passwords.)

There are versions of these databases that provide high-quality information for the general public, rather than specifically for acadmic use, and again it's mainly companies like ProQuest, Infotrac and EbscoHost who create these databases. The public-oriented versions of these databases are available for free at your public library. Again, they make the "free" web look like crap.

It's not only because these databases are paid for by libraries that they are part of the library world; it's also because these companies employ librarians, and also because they incorporate strong indexing according to standards developed in the library world to make the right information easily accessible.

Libraries are electronic to a much higher degree than most posters here seem to realize. It goes far beyond having internet access available at the library, though that is a good thing. It is to the point where a large and growing portion of the information that libraries pay for (using your tax money or tuition fees) IS electronic.

But I say this at the risk of discounting the present importance of books. While I think most written communication will "go electronic" eventually, librarians know that we are far from there now. What is valuable about books isn't the fact that they are on paper; it's the fact that they represent comprehensive intellectual effort and an investment of time that you don't find in journal and magazine articles. And at present, they are rarely published electronically. So, at present, it's incumbent upon librarians to provide information in book form.

I am a librarian (who uses linux at home).

I have a short manifesto about the value of libraries, at http://libr.org/Juice/manifesto.html.

I'd also like to direct your attention to an article from the journal Progressive Librarian which argues the importance of keeping paper, called "Why Do We Need to Keep This in Print? It's on the Web...": A Review of Electronic Archiving Issues and Problems, by Dorothy Warner: http://libr.org/PL/19-20_Warner.html. I'm sure that it could create a good discussion here in its own right, as many of you would disagree with it strongly. I post it here to point out that librarians who have not joined the "information party" they way that young techies have have reasons for their reluctance and are thoughtful in their criticism. But I can't say that without remarking that librarians are also a diverse group, which includes luddites and young techies alike.