[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.