http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/05/college_libraries_should_keep_their_books_in_the_stacks.html
This is, then, one way in which books are far from obsolete: They are the best intellectual chaperones money can buy, both the creators and the preservers of the contemplative space that every university needs if it’s not to turn fully into a strip mall with frats. Yes, it is expensive to house a robust, accessible collection of what will soon be a forgotten format. But it would be more expensive to come up with an adequate replacement that still had the same irreplaceable effect on students—so expensive and involved, in fact, that it wouldn’t be worth doing at all. Not when the boosters could pay good money to use that space on game day, for a 95-foot TV.
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