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> Thinking back, I'm not sure why the library did not have an encyclopedia... Different libraries often have very different collections, depending on the commu

> Thinking back, I'm not sure why the library did not have an encyclopedia... Different libraries often have very different collections, depending on the community they're serving. A university library might have 10 copies of the same undergraduate introductory physics textbook, a copy of a few dozen other undergraduate introductory physics textbooks, and a load of more advanced texts in the same area. A community library might have a large selection of children's books and romance novels, crime novels, mystery novels, some popular science, audio books, travel guides, local history, but no college-level physics books. A high school library might have plenty of young-adult novels and high-school-level textbooks, but no children's books or advanced physics texts. Perhaps you were in a community library and they didn't get many kids doing homework? (Of course, libraries can almost always get any book you ask for on inter-library loan so that community or high-school library could get an advanced physics textbook if someone asked for one)

n3storm 2y ago
USA is deeply different. Looks like antigeneralizationism. I live in Spain and I lived in Limerick and libraries are mostly similar, both university and municipal ones.
- rerdavies 2y ago
  Do your municipal libraries carry journals? I can't imagine how that works. In Canada, neighborhood libraries are a tiny fraction of the size of university research libraries, so they can't possibly carry anything remotely approximating the content of a university research library. We do have a central public library, with perhaps a million odd books, but is not a replacement for research library in any sense, and isn't intended to be one. Compare that to the library in my alma mater university which contained about 2.5 million books. For what it's worth, for most of my life, I've had the option of visiting my local university library so that I could crawl through the shelves looking for particular journal articles, or searching through the 3 feet of shelves on other side of a relevant book that I found in the card stacks. Sadly, that's no longer the case. The vast majority of content in modern university libraries is now available only in digital form, accessible through terminals that are not usable by members of the public, which provide access to otherwise-paywalled journals. And the last time I visited my local university library, they no longer allowed members of the general public to enter. For most of the my lifetime, one of the conditions of government funding for university libraries was that they had to provide at least limited access to the general public. I'm not sure what happened. Thankfully, there are now other ways to access research material. Pre-prints are often available, and open-access journals are increasingly prevalent. And for those that are desperate, there are, of course, various dubiously legal sources.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  That is very strange. Local libraries subscribe to Elsevier journals, for example? What would be the point in that? If not, then they are not similar, since that’s the main purpose of a university library Btw in Germany and the UK it’s like in the USA

n3storm 2y ago

USA is deeply different. Looks like antigeneralizationism. I live in Spain and I lived in Limerick and libraries are mostly similar, both university and municipal ones.

rerdavies 2y ago
Do your municipal libraries carry journals? I can't imagine how that works. In Canada, neighborhood libraries are a tiny fraction of the size of university research libraries, so they can't possibly carry anything remotely approximating the content of a university research library. We do have a central public library, with perhaps a million odd books, but is not a replacement for research library in any sense, and isn't intended to be one. Compare that to the library in my alma mater university which contained about 2.5 million books. For what it's worth, for most of my life, I've had the option of visiting my local university library so that I could crawl through the shelves looking for particular journal articles, or searching through the 3 feet of shelves on other side of a relevant book that I found in the card stacks. Sadly, that's no longer the case. The vast majority of content in modern university libraries is now available only in digital form, accessible through terminals that are not usable by members of the public, which provide access to otherwise-paywalled journals. And the last time I visited my local university library, they no longer allowed members of the general public to enter. For most of the my lifetime, one of the conditions of government funding for university libraries was that they had to provide at least limited access to the general public. I'm not sure what happened. Thankfully, there are now other ways to access research material. Pre-prints are often available, and open-access journals are increasingly prevalent. And for those that are desperate, there are, of course, various dubiously legal sources.
bowsamic 2y ago
That is very strange. Local libraries subscribe to Elsevier journals, for example? What would be the point in that? If not, then they are not similar, since that’s the main purpose of a university library Btw in Germany and the UK it’s like in the USA