> Most librarians would agree with you that the current situation is terrible, and if you look at library literature they've generally felt that way from the be

> Most librarians would agree with you that the current situation is terrible, and if you look at library literature they've generally felt that way from the beginning. I know! I’m a former librarian who has worked with a lot of “big players” on the institutional and software side of things. > They are highly constrained by copyright law. Here’s where I disagree with you: they’re largely constrained by the kind of administrative bloat that has permeated all of academia, which has no technical expertise and prefers corporate solutions or managing large-scale, dead-end projects for resume padding. I was on the receiving end of this so many times I left the field. > re: microfiche, it lasts much longer than digital scans -- if kept in good conditions it has a usable half-life on the scale of >100 years, while digital files need much more active maintenance to both prevent bit-rot and to ensure the file-type is still readable (eg countless file formats have been abandoned and are only currently accessible via emulators of older machines). True on the digital files part, not so much on the microfiche/ film which proved in many cases to be of poor durability and prone to data loss. But my comment was more about how it’s adoption caused libraries to destroy huge parts of their collections with little recourse once microfiche/film proved to not live up to its marketing claims or in cases where it was poorly implemented. I recommend Nicholson Baker’s “Double Fold” for a good account of all of this.