[alexhutcheson]

In my experience, most college students really just want a good space to work and study, with a mix of quiet spaces and areas for group work. Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway. In 4 years, I think the only books I ever checked out were novels I was reading for pleasure, and I could have easily gotten them from the city library instead.

From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.

Grad students and researchers have different needs, though.

[colmvp]

> From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.

Ha! Funnily enough I left WeWork because of their incessant need to blast music ALL... THE... TIME. During the times when I needed to really hunker down and grok hard material that required hours of intense focus, I would end up going to the nearby library.

That said, I agree with the sentiment of your comment. The local library is packed with students throughout the day because of the availability of desks/seated areas.

[irrational]

Do you mean you were working for the company WeWork, or you were working in one of their for rent spaces?

Either way, that sucks. I need absolute quiet or white noise to concentrate. That would be the absolute worst work environment (Well, okay, maybe not the worst. Working as a slave on a roman war galley that was on fire and I was chained to the bench would be worse, but it would be a close second).

[colmvp]

I was co-working / part-time studying in the co-working area.

I can deal with background chitchat since I can tune that out but hearing music I can't stand to listen to is really hard to ignore, especially when they jack up the volume! I don't know why the insist on having music always playing, people have left the co-working space because of it. At times it felt more like a frat party than a serious place for people to get work done.

[ghaff]

I’m pretty much the same way. Ambient people sounds—unless really loud/intrusive—are fine. And I sometimes even probably prefer to silence/isolation. But lose the music unless maybe it’s maybe quiet background instrumentals. I tend not to listen to music when working even when I’m in total control of the playlist and volume.

[antod]

> I’m pretty much the same way. Ambient people sounds—unless really loud/intrusive—are fine. And I sometimes even probably prefer to silence/isolation.

Interestingly that relates to one of the few acoustic design points I remember from an architecture paper I failed decades ago.

The point was about Libraries, and how you shouldn't design their acoustics to be as quiet as possible. When something is really quiet, small noises like someone getting up can be very disturbing. While if you design them to have an audible but muffled background murmour where details/sources can't be picked out subconsciously, people will be disturbed less when sounds do happen.

[PeterStuer]

This is also why I abandoned my quest for 100% silent computers in favor of going for a still very quiet but pleasant timbre.

[puranjay]

I can't understand what genius decided that all workspaces have to feel like a shitty club. Who plays music in a place literally called WeWork?

[nashashmi]

WeWork pivoted from startup idea WeChillAtWork.

I know...I know.

[Aperocky]

"idea"

Some idea really should be described as "brainfart".

[ItypeRandom]

Isn't the point of WeWork exactly that chatter? It allows for a space where people from different worlds can work in the same space giving a great opportunity for connections. This is all from second-hand hearsay, never actually worked in one.

[colmvp]

Don’t get me wrong I’m okay with hearing background chatter for as you said its part of the reason why one joins a coworking space: socializing. I’m was mostly just complaining about the music and loud talking on phones (when they have phone booths)

[mumblemumble]

My coworking space (not WeWork) has also been turning the music up lately. I'm finding that it causes the background chatter to become intolerable, too, since people naturally respond to loud music by talking even louder.

I think that WeWork has really set a bad precedent here. It was the first coworking space I toured that seemed to be pushing itself as more of a social space than a place to hunker down and get some work done. Since then, though, pretty much everyone seems to be headed in that direction.

[ben509]

Did work at one for a few years, a better name would be WeTalkAboutWork.

[pbk1]

Strangely enough I have a bunch of co-workers who swear they can't get things done without music, noises, or chitchat in the background. One in particular is a reformed trader who uses tracks of noisy trading floors as a focus tool.

I on the other hand need noise-canceling headphones and a confined private workspace to feel really productive. To each their own I suppose!

[speedplane]

> I need absolute quiet or white noise to concentrate.

This is a common complaint today, but maybe I’m weird, I just don’t need it. I can work with a jackhammer outside the window, or an office mate picking their toenails five feet away. When I was a kid, my Dad and I played “the artillery game”, where I would shout answers to simple math problems with music or the radio blasting. Sure I don’t like either of those things, but I can still get my stuff done. Demanding absolute stillness and silence is a bit complainy.

[Yhippa]

We rent an office and the noise is fine unless you have noisy neighbors.

[colmvp]

I was strictly commenting on the co-working space. If you rent a dedicated office, there's enough sound proofing where indeed noise shouldn't be a problem.

[bobloblaw45]

Oh goodness yes this.

I've never been able to study at home. I don't know what it is. But in libraries I'm totally in the zone.

It's unfortunate because library hours are so limited. I'd love for there to be a 24 hour library that always had enough seating.

I actually had an idea starting a private membership 24hr study space that would serve primarily as a quiet study space for students. Tables, wifi, strict rules on noise...essentially using the gym business model. But I'm broke and know nothing about running a business but we can all dream.

[foobarian]

I think the problem is the unpredictability. At home if I'm not alone I'm constantly waiting for "the other shoe to drop," so to speak so I can't get into the zone. With a place like the library there is a predictable time period of guaranteed peace and quiet.

[devinplatt]

At UC Davis the Sheilds library has a 24 hour room, and during finals week at the entire library has extended hours.

I loved the 24 hour room back when I was a student. It was super quiet and was so starkly ugly you had no business being there unless you were getting some serious schoolwork done.

[_raoulcousins]

All I remember about that room was that it was nearly impossible to find a seat during finals (about 12 years ago!). We used to drive to a 24 hour coffee shop in Dixon instead. Nice to get a few miles away from Davis during finals, but even that place was jam packed with students.

[r00fus]

> I've never been able to study at home. I don't know what it is. But in libraries I'm totally in the zone.

Social/peer pressure? Knowing you're accountable to others around you? I don't know about a library but for sure occasionally doing war-room at work makes me very productive (though often not directly on the thing we're war-rooming about).

[niij]

See: "TK Park" Bangkok for a great example of a private library.

[pgcj_poster]

As a college student who mostly reads ebooks, shelves of physical books at my university's libraries are incredibly useful when writing papers. When I find one book that I can use, there's usually several on the same shelf that I wouldn't have known to search for, but turn out to be really useful.

Also, there's no substitute for the feeling you get from working next to a stack of physical books.

[danhak]

> Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books

Spoken like someone who never took a humanities course.

[kipchak]

For my library and classes we were more likely to use something like JSTOR than hunt through the racks. The overlap of being common enough to be available but obscure enough to be interesting was fairly low. For example writing about Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey the physical library wasn't much help.

[ghaff]

When I do research at one of the local university libraries, it’s almost always just accessing online journals and other digital information. The only reason I have to physically go there is because some of the material is only available if you’re on the campus network.

Though the library system does have some nice places to work :-) I confess I’m more of an ambient social space worker these days. If I want solitude and quiet I can get that at home.

[compiler-guy]

The sentence in context is that the undergraduates actually have the physical books, and therefore didn't need the library's copy.

[danhak]

I understood the context. What usually happens is students purchase books that are assigned for everyone taking a particular class, then use the library to borrow specific books to complete research papers, criticism etc. on their chosen topics.

[quaquaqua1]

Yeah, I was a history major, I would cite 30 plus sources per paper, many of which had never been checked out of the library ever before and weren't available digitally :0

[tyingq]

Recently put two kids through college, and there were almost no physical books. Not for student centric needs though.

It was so they could DRM and/or change the content every semester to earn the school more money.

The worst is when the Prof makes their own online book required. $90+ a pop, and you can't resell at the end of the semester.

Grr.

[jcranmer]

> Grad students and researchers have different needs, though.

Yes, access to the more obscure literature like the Springer books for advanced math, or highly specialized history books (such as a history of Ottoman naval warfare) is pretty essential at the graduate or later level.

[goerz]

Actually, in my entire ~10 years of having been a grad student and then researcher in theoretical physics, I didn't take out books from a library even once! I have yet to come across any material that is not available in electronic form (well, one very specialized book, which I did buy, cut off the spine, and ran through a ScanSnap)

[jasone]

I attended grad school 2003-2009. The first few years I routinely pulled hardcopy at the library. By ~2007 I was able to get everything electronically. Not so long ago, dead trees mattered.

[seanmcdirmid]

For CS, no. I’ve never had the urge to go through a springer conference proceedings rather than just download the papers I needed directly. Checking out the old outdated books at the engineering library was nostalgic, however.

[e12e]

I remember that it was nice to be able to check out Nelson's computer lib, as it was ridiculously expensive and hard to get hold of second hand. A couple of other classics like Knuth, the smalltalk manual and Forth books is also nice to be able to read in hard copy.

But then, I remember I got half way through a copy of, I believe it was:

"Narrative of the expedition of an American squadron to the China seas and Japan, performed in the years 1852, 1853 and 1854, under the command of M.C. Perry" Francis Lister Hawks , New York , 1856

https://bibsys-almaprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-expl...

As tangentially related to the year of Japanese I studied. Had to go to the library to read it - copy was too old and rare for me to take home (which was part of why I only got halfway through - but seeing that it's 600 pages I don't feel quite so bad about that).

Ed: looks like it is available at archive.org - not as nice as the physical book, but for the curious:

https://archive.org/details/narrativeofexped0156perr

https://archive.org/details/narrativeofexped01perr

(looks like two different sources?)

[aspaceman]

You still need advanced math for topics in CS and often the only book is some expensive springer book.

[seanmcdirmid]

Some maybe? Definitely not my area, we can get all the math we need online in one form or another. Or the math is coming from someone’s paper or online book anyways.

[goerz]

Aren’t all Springer books online at SpringerLink?

[bigred100]

Only most of them

[justanothersys]

Nothing beats a physical library for a joyful adventure in browsing through all the disciplines. An experience I found crucial to my personal development in college, despite carrying my laptop everywhere.

[QuesnayJr]

I loved that so much when I first went to college. I remember just walking around and finding out how many different things I didn't know.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Curious undergrads benefit from the books too. I got a lot out of different books' presentations of subjects in undergrad. Read the assigned text first, then look at how the books next to it on the shelf talk about the subject. So much easier than trying to slog through a single version, and you learn more too.

[Iv]

About books, I'd say it is all or nothing. Small libraries books won't be of any use. But when I was in Lyon, the main library is an old institution that contains archives of 100 years of newspapers and scientific publications.

I once had to look for the media impact of a 1987 trial, and behold, they had the microfilm.

Let's take a moment to remember that we could digitize all this but that stupid copyright laws makes it forbidden.

I hope we manage to reform these before these libraries stop getting funded.

[ci5er]

> Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway.

This was not my experience after the first 18 months. Maybe things are different than they were in the 80s. Or maybe my school was different (we had a lot of cross-functional projects), or maybe my professors were humoring me by letting me design my own upper-level (but under-grad) curriculum ... but I spent a LOT of time in the library. Sometimes to pull textbooks, but mostly to pull journal articles that described similar or adjacent research. (Or maybe I was a weird kid? That's definitely possible - but all the engineers at our school were weird kids, so I wouldn't have picked up on it.)

[plorkyeran]

Reading journal articles has been something you do on your computer for quite a while now. The library was tangentially involved in the process (in that you get access to the online journals via the library's subscription) but there was no reason to physically go to the library for it.

[xg15]

The article kind of disagrees with that:

> Plus, a growing body of evidence shows that physical books and papers are more conducive to learning than digital formats are.

I'd also agree with the article's point that getting face-to face advice from a librarian can be a lot more helpful for research than crawling through the internet by yourself - especially of you're an undergrad.

[alexhutcheson]

If I had to read journal articles, I would download and print the PDF - still paper, but didn't require a trip to the library. It never even occurred to me to go to the library for the hard-copy of the full journal.

[detaro]

Nowadays, journal articles in STEM fields typically are online through library services, public preprint servers or sci-hub.

[sweeneyrod]

Things were almost certainly different in the 80s. For instance, the PDF was invented in 93.

[notatoad]

>Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway.

I fell for this trap in my freshman year, but by my second year of undergrad i discovered that even though the syllabus might say i had to buy textbooks, the library actually did have copies of pretty much everything i needed.

[anongraddebt]

In undergrad, a couple people in a class would make a mad dash to the library after receiving the syllabus so they could grab the one or two copies of the textbook. I can't recall ever beating them to it.

[ThemalSpan]

I agree! I think this need really shines at universities where housing hasn't kept up with enrollment, so common areas are converted to living space, living space becomes more crowded, etc. Squeezes students out of a lot other spaces they might have otherwise used for working, collaborative or otherwise.

[wtvanhest]

The solution is probably to require all public universities to have enough books on hand in their libraries to satisfy all required books for classes. Once that rule is in place, administrators and professors could argue over resource allocations.

[yardie]

> Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books, since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway.

Once I found out about the university library reserve system I cut my textbook budget in half. It was something first-gen, broke college students aren't told about that would have saved them from spending on books they only needed occassionally.

[mschuetz]

My university library had most of the "required" books to use for free. Took me a while and some money to find that out, though.

[kkylin]

I think the needs of grad students and researchers are highly field-dependent. I'm a mathematician, and I still use the library for older books. (Journal papers, even older ones, are mostly on-line now.) But my colleagues in e.g. biology, where things move a lot faster, don't seem to ever set foot in libraries.

[kache_]

>since they're told to buy almost all the books they need for each class anyway

I was successful in not buying a single book throughout all of university - and it wasn't because I used the library. Everything you need is out there. Note: I didn't buy a single book because I could not afford it

[black_puppydog]

Not sure how this is now, but Germany 10 years ago my professors would either give out lecture notes (reproduced at printing cost locally and/or as pdf) or choose books that the library had.

In one case, a professor used a book he had written for a programming/algorithms course. "I'll make sure the library gets a bunch of those before the first homeworks are due." And sure enough, they had enough for everyone in class.

Fix your education system. Seriously, it's embarassing.

[lukejduncan]

I found that I could buy books for the semester on Amazon used and sell them back to the school bookstore at a profit pretty consistently.

[hellcow]

Then professors started assigning digital homework which you could only access with new books for $200+.

[speedplane]

> Undergraduates rarely needed to access the physical books

Huge libraries of books may possibly be obsolete at large universities, especially for undergrads. But when I went to school, I found immense value in my schools access to periodicals. I read them voraciously and learned how to quickly read (and later write) technical articles. It quickly became clear they were instrumental with staying up to date with the state of the art.

It’s a pity that most of these academic periodicals are out of reach for everyone outside academia, they are the closest we have to true source material.

[adamsea]

At least at my liberal arts school checking out books for research for papers was common.

To be honest I pity college students who never have the need - or even worse, the desire - to get books from their college library.

[satya71]

I remember spending a lot of time in the library reading non-course work academic books and journals. Definitely loved that we had a well stocked library for a developing country.

[pathsjs]

As an undergrad in maths, I spent lots and lots of afternoons browsing my university library and picking many interesting books about everything. Yes, there's the internet, but reading maths on paper is really a different experience, and moreover you don't know what you don't know, so it is not easy to replicate the experience online. And no, they were not required for my courses, but you're not there just to pass the courses, you're there to learn

[Aperocky]

No, grad students and researcher have the exact same need.

Unless you're majoring in classical latin, but then again, what piece of information is not digitized already? If it's not, the first user to come across that in academia should do just that.

All of my information is on my computer, and I didn't need to write down anything for almost a year now.

[Mediterraneo10]

In linguistics, archaeology, and history across a broad span of Europe and Asia, the vast majority of publications (even must-cite references) are not digitized.

Digitization done well costs money and man-hours, and most humanities departments are not exactly flush with cash and manpower.

[minikites]

There's a tremendous amount of information that hasn't been digitized and only exists in print or microfilm. There's no money available to fund the labor and clear the rights to make these works digital.

[walshemj]

Books are easier in some ways doesn't need power and you can have several open on a desk at the same time

RE Latin / Classics when I was doing classical studies in 6th form in the UK I wanted to do some additional reading.

A well known eccentric classical scholar (G M Lee) used to have his personal desk set up with all the books he needed.

I had to get my Mum who worked at the library to ask the county librarian to ask him if some one else could borrow some of the books.

[ken]

Do undergraduates at your college not need to do research? I spent a lot of my undergrad time in the libraries looking for books.

[xxpor]

Not OP, but I never needed to research anything where I couldnt find what I was looking for on scholar.google.com.

One time for a club I did need to find an SAE standard, and that might have been the one time I ever checked out a book for non pleasure reading.

[vondur]

That is one of the reasons specifically mentioned in the article. It's nice to have a quiet space to read and study.

[cm2187]

A library, but without the books!

[GhettoMaestro]

> From an average undergrad's perspective, the ideal "library" is probably something more like a WeWork.

Oh god. Somewhere you probably just spawned a demon idea: WeWork-style partnerships with universities to build "co-working" spaces on-campus.

JK - but probably not!