Why Libraries [Still] Matter — Biblio — Medium

"In the late Nineteenth Century the Spanish Marquis de Olivart — a writer, ambassador, professor, and sometime foreign minister — had amassed an enviable collection of some fourteen thousand international law books. He then gave the collection to the Spanish government, moved, he said, 'by a patriotism that was as ardent as it was sterile.' The government didn’t stick to the terms of the gift in maintaining the collection, and the disillusioned Marquis managed to claw it back. Word got around that it might be for sale. The Harvard Law School Librarian lobbied to put in a bid — one that would cost the school nearly every spare cent it had. After contentious discussion, the faculty approved. Gold bullion was deposited into the Marquis’s bank, and the books were smuggled out under cover of night, apparently to avoid inciting the Spanish government to ban their export, or perhaps to avoid the eye of the Marquis’s lenders. Thus did a law school library score a coup of materials, and whet its appetite for more. The next year, acquisitions vaulted Harvard’s collections to over eighty percent of all the world’s English law books published before 1601. Tales like these, shared in the law school’s own official reminiscences published in the 1950's and 60's, reinforce the notion of a library as a storehouse of rare and precious things. And with good reason. Libraries originated at a time when books were expensive, difficult to copy, and thus perhaps irreplaceable. To be able to pool them in one place had some real benefits ... Fast forward past the year 2000, and both carefully accruing collections and expertly guiding people through them might seem quaint. The Web contains information about nearly anything, and search engines effortlessly index the Web. The only thing left, by this theory, is mopping up: retroactively digitizing materials that are sitting quietly in archives and depositories. Once that’s done, the only function a general-purpose library could serve is as a place to put terminals with Internet access and hold classes on Web browsing, so that anyone can use one ... I co-authored a study investigating link rot in legal scholarship and judicial opinions, and was shocked to find that, circa late 2013, nearly three out of four links found within all Harvard Law Review articles were dead. Half of the links in U.S. Supreme Court opinions were dead ... That’s why the HLS Library is proud to be a founding member ofperma.cc, a consortium complementing the extraordinary Internet Archive, seeking to preserve copies of the sources that scholars and judges link to on the open Web. The preserved materials can be readily accessible for the ages, placed on the record within a formal, disinterested, distributed repository of the world’s great libraries. This is especially important as information might not only vanish, but be adulterated ..."