Lament for the MIT Libraries

Well-written but extremely depressing. Physical library spaces have been important to me for most of my life. I spent so much time in libraries as a kid and in college. My whole life was changed through working with academic librarians and archivists. I would be doing something extremely different if it wasn't for my work in that space.

Hearing that MIT, surely an extremely wealthy school, is throwing out the opportunity for new students to experience libraries in a substantial way is not a great sign for the students who will enter and graduate from that school in the future.

When texts are accessed solely by digitized means, without experiential basis in the original volumes, organization and material contexts, the learner is cut off from the process, extent and relationships that ground and constitute human works and knowledge. Those original works on paper, now being stored in dark spaces away from learner – or even staff-access, are the irreplaceable core and heart of human knowledge, history and expression. As the digital scan forms of many of those works [but probably excluding those whose copyrights are still enforceable] enter the repositories of AI, the works, ideas and facts become plagiarized and misrepresented. [When I was educated, plagiarism was the most serious academic offense; now it is epidemic via AI.] As AI-generated plagiarized text and images expand across the internet’s digital world, the actual voice of human-generated content diminishes.