[ineedasername]

I think the biggest benefit of physical libraries, often overlooked by students, are the professional reference librarians that staff them. I was a competent researcher in college, but if I had difficulties, if the catalog looked like it didn't hold anything I could use, I went to the reference desk, and never was disappointed.

One particular project involved correlating & comparing prison funding & criminal recidivism with education spending in the state I was in. Books held nothing on this, and the government documents section massive, dense & daunting. The reference librarian saved me many hours of work by getting me directly to what I needed, and suggesting other resources as well.

The internet has made casual research extraordinarily easy, but it's like an 80/20 split. The average person can get 80% of the way there, but these reference librarians are professionals in their field, with all the connotations that being a "professional" comes with.

[claudeganon]

Physical libraries are also great maintainers of specialty digital resources that would be unlikely to be accessible without their presence.

A recent example: an artist friend of mine was looking for images of historic aircraft using various common image search tools (Google image search, Flickr, etc). The result skewed toward specific models of planes and from a small set of angles. These results were unsatisfying as they were searching out references for an animation project where they needed a broader set of planes from a greater number of angles.

When they told me about this problem, I, having more experience with academic and special libraries, pointed out that institutions like the National Air and Space Museum and military colleges were likely to have their own digital collections of airplane photography that are not well indexed (or at least represented) in tools like Google. We spent a few minutes searching together, and sure enough, we found a much better reference set in the digital collections of these institutions, as well as indexes of similar resources put together by their librarians.

[journalctl]

And I think chances are, these reference librarians will have masters degrees! They’re incredibly knowledgeable, and at least every librarian I’ve ever met has been not only good at what they do, but incredibly passionate too. And if anyone’s looking for ways technology and libraries intersect (besides information storage/retrieval), I recommend the Library Freedom Project [1] (I linked to Wikipedia because their main page seems to be blank.) It’s a program that works with libraries to teach librarians about things like digital privacy rights.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Freedom_Project

[joe5150]

it would be very hard to become a university librarian without a master’s degree in library science, and a lot of subject librarians will have two master’s degrees! librarians are a great time-saving tool if you have serious research needs.

[JJMcJ]

Even ordinary city libraries can often help with reading lists.

[ineedasername]

Absolutely! I didn't mean for my comment to be limited to college libraries, though that's probably how it came across. I first learned to appreciate them growing up in the days when the internet was in its early infancy & even if there'd been good online resources, I was too poor for a computer anyway. My town library was pretty decent, and even had remote access to some of the early content databases.