Robert Darnton, a scholar on books and the director of the Harvard Library, delivers a defense of the traditional library in this New York Review of Books essay. I love libraries. They began transforming my life from elementary school and they kept doing it up through graduate school and my young career as a college teacher. So, I don’t really need to hear a defense of libraries. I love them and use them. But in the age of the internet, apparently, librarians and lovers of libraries are anxious to make their libraries relevant. The problem is, Darnton’s essay really isn’t that persuasive. His argument makes perfect sense to me, and it can be summed up as: Libraries are great because books are great and because they are places where scholars and students can go to use the internet.

That’s not very powerful. The argument “books are good” only works with people who usually already like libraries. And the internet argument is flaccid, too. This is his best paragraph, however:

In fact, the strongest argument for the old-fashioned book is its effectiveness for ordinary readers. Thanks to Google, scholars are able to search, navigate, harvest, mine, deep link, and crawl (the terms vary along with the technology) through millions of Web sites and electronic texts. At the same time, anyone in search of a good read can pick up a printed volume and thumb through it at ease, enjoying the magic of words as ink on paper. No computer screen gives satisfaction like the printed page. But the Internet delivers data that can be transformed into a classical codex. It already has made print-on-demand a thriving industry, and it promises to make books available from computers that will operate like ATM machines: log in, order electronically, and out comes a printed and bound volume. Perhaps someday a text on a hand-held screen will please the eye as thoroughly as a page of a codex produced two thousand years ago.

Here’s an idea: it’s never very effective to tell a younger generation that something old is important. They won’t believe you. You have to show them it’s important. So librarians need to do something to make their buildings important. Make them places where students must go. Make the information there more valuable than information somewhere else. Make them places where scholars must go, where they have to go. Make them places where knowledge is found. And if the internet won’t allow it, then we’ll simply be having far fewer libraries. But the ones we do have, I think, will be great places to visit. Nevertheless, Darnton’s history of the library is very informative and shows how the library changed history, and still might.