The Digitalization of Print Sources and the Loss of Libraries

Ever since the widespread access to the digital electronic medium of words on screen, there has been a steady decline of a physical material medium to store, share, and enjoy words manifested from the minds of humans. Instead, from carving “words” into nature and the development of ink onto paper, the new medium for the human language has escaped the material physicality it has historically used in digital electronic format. The digitalization of books, words, of images, has been met with exciting fanfare where the world has moved from putting ink on paper to tapping keys on a keyboard to create and write (or now type) their thoughts. Increasingly, the physical medium of ink on paper has been replaced with electronic versions. Perhaps my generation will be one of the last few that experience the educational transition from a paper medium to an electronic one as I step through the American educational system. Personally, my elementary and middle school placed crucial importance on school libraries and offering a physical place to borrow and read books. However, at the tail end of my middle school years, all students were offered iPads and increasingly, the physicality of written materials declined into some form of electronic digital medium. I shifted from combing the modest collection of books offered by my school library to scrolling the enormous digital access granted to me by the internet. Before long, the lack of a library in my high school did not concern me nor did the 1000-page pdf of my Calculus textbook that I crtl-F through to reach the correct page. Before I knew it, the world beyond my classroom was also digitalized. The plastic-wrapped newspapers tossed in front of my home slowly disappeared, replaced with pre-formatted emails offering a subscription service to receive tailored news “right in my mailbox.”

The digitalization of books has many benefits that are enjoyed and celebrated today. However, the shift from physical paper books to e-books has resulted in the loss of not only the actual paper books but also the spaces that hold them. The greatest loss of the electronic reproduction of books is not the loss of the physical paper book but the loss of the spaces that hold them; the loss of libraries.

The Role of Libraries

Libraries are more than a storage unit that house physical volumes of books. Libraries are places that play a critical role in our communities. They manifestly represent places of opportunity, learning, and freedom for many people. Libraries are a public space for meeting both information and people [pg 101]. What’s crucial about libraries is the fact that they often offer free public space for people to meet and access a plethora of information. While information may become more accessible on the internet, physical spaces for nurturing creativity and concentrated reading away from the noise and short bursts of electronic media are critical in our current society.

Beyond just communities, libraries are especially important for the academic ecosystem of college campuses. Libraries on college campuses are places that offer not only knowledge but a place to connect students as a community. They play a critical role in campus culture [1]. Looking closer to home, an article by Ben Ratcliff for the New York Times explores Columbia University’s historical Butler University and notes that the library is a haven for the body and the mind [2]. While Butler is accessible to us as Columbia law students, the loss of our law library indicates that our law school community may be critically altered.

Access to Information

Contrary to the idea of improved access provided by technology, the digitalization of libraries also presents a critical issue to our freedom to access information. While we are now privy to more information due to having the internet at our fingerprints, the loss of physical libraries prevents access to information due to the commercialization of books. Legal methods of obtaining free books or information have become severely limited by commercial paywalls. Even reading the news has become difficult with multiple different news mediums preventing access to their information without paying.

The ability and ease with which the internet can manipulate, and feed information is an enormous concern for our freedom of access to information [pg 103]. In the library’s physical space, while the contents of the library may have been curated by an individual librarian, there is true freedom to explore the knowledge of books without additional interference. A person can parse through the many volumes gathered in the bookshelves without the fear of a third-party search engine tracking and feeding specific types of information to them.

Additionally, national and historic libraries preserve and carefully collect cultural and historical heritage which provide a rich source of information from political, ideological to social and cultural worth. Libraries, through the preservation of books, newspapers, and other physical mediums present values of cultural diversity, freedom to think and inspire, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech [pg 104]. The importance of libraries to gather, preserve, and offer a space for people to reach and explore these cultural pieces is truly an opportunity to access information that facilitates the freedom to think. However, the digitalization of these paper mediums and the removal of physical access to libraries will not continue or increase access as initially considered. Instead of providing quality information, the internet offers too much information and disinformation that is controlled and monitored.

Conclusion

While the natural progression and shift from physical books to digitalizing the printed medium may promote access to these books, the loss of libraries indicates not only a physical place of respite but can affect critical access to information. This loss of cultural information may affect our freedom to think and learn in ways that could be detrimental to our society and culture.