@JilltheTooth It’s more efficient if I don’t have to make a trip to the library. The library is fifteen to twenty minutes away. You have to prepare to go. You have to use gasoline or wait for the subway and walk (which takes even longer). You have to pay for parking if you take the car. You have to deal with librarians who often seem to be in bad moods—at least at our library.
So if you go to a library, you take at least an hour out of your day in order to get the book on your kindle. If I could borrow it from home, it would take probably five minutes to do the same thing. It’s also lighter on the planet.
The only reason, these days, to go to the library, it seems to me, is to talk to the librarian and to have the librarian show you stuff and teach you stuff. Librarians should be information acquisition, management, and analytical method consultants. Our only interactions with librarians should be related to those things—when we can’t handle those tasks ourselves.
There is one other task for librarians that involve customers and that is networking. Librarians should bring together readers and authors. Other than that, there is no need for customers to actually enter a library, these days, except of course for materials that are available only on paper. But those are rapidly disappearing as everything is being digitized.
My whole collection is digital, so I’m already to that point. People see me for consultations. I don’t even provide them with materials. I teach them how to find and access the materials on their own. I show they where to start and teach them how to think about it.