I’m glad to see this near the top of this post. The reality of what’s been happening to libraries in the shift to the digital age keeps getting ignored by everyone. For those of us who grew up only being able to afford reading books by borrowing from libraries, I’ve been dismayed to see so little discussion around this. Like other commenters have said, libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today and I think that points to a fundamental problem with legislation.
What a library is today is so different. I'm not sure I would leave my kids alone in one like my parents used to. There was always the homeless element, but now there's rampant drug use in and around, anti-social behaviour is ignored or tolerated and it's not really about the books (digital or paper) but the free internet to troll your social media. Libraries used to be accessible jewels of knowledge, now they're generic community spaces.
Unfortunately, I don't believe there are many such places. If one is living in their tent, car, or similar situation, there are very few places where one is even allowed to exist peacefully without spending a few dollars, let alone take care of one's hygiene.
Libraries are one of the precious few places where one is not charged on entry or otherwise expected to buy something. Even public parks are increasingly hostile to the homeless, but often no real alternatives are offered. And I think that's a shame.
My city started a program to train librarians to administer narcan and the city distributes narcan to libraries [0]. I can't imagine Chicago is has a larger homeless population than most other cities (as it's very affordable here).
This isn't generally true, I am in the Boston area and only the Main branch is anything like this, all the tens of other libraries are safe places where a kid would be fine for hours.
yup i remember using the sound proof booths they had for patrons at my library and not hearing the announcement that the library had closed got locked in and only noticed when they librarians started turning off the lights to leave.
An unfortunate consequence of internet piracy is that noncommercial activity has been pushed out of mainstream policy. The library was way more crucial when I couldn't just illegally pirate a book on the internet. In turn I was way more willing to fight for it.
> mainstream policy [is...] an unfortunate consequence of internet piracy
no, this is obscene degrees of victim-blaming here. the modern copyright regime predates the internet being a major commercial vector for anything by literally decades. the DAT tape wars were 80s, the VHS/Betamax time-shifting wars were 70s. taping off the radio was 60s.
obviously as the noose tightens, more and more activity becomes "criminal", so the "criminal activity" stats probably do go up over time, but that doesn't inherently reflect some change in social mores as much as the legal framework changing out from underneath it. and that was not initiated by anything to do with the internet - this really dates back to the "taping off the radio" days and the blowback from studios who didn't like that, and retrenched in the 80s and particularly the 90s.
For popularity VHS was the 80's I think: "JVC released the first VHS machines in Japan in late 1976, and in the United States in mid-1977." and took a few years to take off widely.
Interestingly enough, VHS was developed in secret at JVC: "However, despite the lack of funding, Takano and Shiraishi continued to work on the project in secret. By 1973, the two engineers had produced a functional prototype.". The development of blue LEDs has a better story. Does Japanese culture encourage secrative development?
> libraries wouldn’t exist if they were to be proposed today
And it would be more or less irrelevant that they didn't, because the massive amount of information made voluntarily available for free on the internet vastly outweighs the initial few centuries of libraries' existence by several orders of magnitude.
