calimac

Very well said. Unlike this liberal arts professor you are making counter arguments and explanations from the inside an informed position rather than from the partial understanding of a frequent library user. I especially like your views on Undergraduate Libraries, though the only college I attended that had one, the University of Washington, it was still being regularly used, perhaps because they moved the audio-visual collection there. I tried hard to get through the Chronicle article, even though when someone mentions poor maligned Nicholson Baker it makes my eyes cross. The brittle book crisis is real and still with us. As librarians we should try our best to calm alarmists like Baker and this professor. You are completely right in stating that digital copies are for access rather than archival storage. We're working on preserving born-digital documents, but we still have a long way to go.