I graduated in the mid 2000s, and right around that time they moved the main library collection into a mechanical bin that you have to request an attendant to request books for you.
I have fond memories of looking up X, and going to the library and exploring the section where X was stored, along with all the books around it. this experience is dead now with their new "system". It's been about 20 years and I'm an old dog now with limited energy. but I would love to (if I were a political activist) do an expose story about how many books were checked out before this transfer was made vs after. I strongly suspect that a lot of knowledge was lost, just due to the friction of having to know which exact book you want, vs having the liberty to browse and freely select whatever you stumbled upon. and not all the info is online, now. due to licensing and copyright. Google Books tried to fight that, but lost. It's sad.
I loved going through our (small) programming & computers section in our school library in the early 2000s, and visiting the local library with a much larger one. I picked up PHP because of that :)
We had fewer distractions, though, even if we didn't have all the world's information so close at hand. I think I'd pick that struggle again over what today's students go through. But I'm glad to have lived in both eras.
I'm not that old, and I still remember being really disappointed when something wasn't in my home (book) Encyclopedia. Then you would trudge to the library to find maybe one book on the obscure topic.
You could request a book be sent from another library, but that would take weeks, and you had no idea what was in that book.
It was wild. Most things were just unknown, or whatever you parents told you.
Then again, I can't imagine the struggle of having to rely entirely on libraries pre-internet