Good point. I'm used to most libraries being part of a national system of libraries, which will get you volumes shipped from another one if they don't have it

Good point. I'm used to most libraries being part of a national system of libraries, which will get you volumes shipped from another one if they don't have it there. Local curation doesn't mean much since your main interface to those libraries nowadays is a digital one that has pretty much any physical media with an ISBN in it, from where you can request non-locally-available media. Maybe the states operate differently and (school) libraries are more independent. Most schools here don't have their own library at all and instead rely on the nearest public one...