It should come as no surprise that library leadership, in moments of dispassionate assessment often augmented by hearing from students who have trouble finding seats during busy periods, would seek to rezone areas occupied by stacks for more individual and group work. At the same time that books increasingly lie dormant, library spaces themselves remain vibrant-Snell Library at Northeastern now receives well over 2 million visits a year-as retreats for focused study and dynamic collaboration, and as sites of an ever wider array of activities and forms of knowledge creation and expression, including, but also well beyond, the printed word. These stark statistics present a conundrum for those who care about libraries and books. At my library at Northeastern University, undergraduate circulations declined 50 percent from 2013 to 2017-before we decided to do our own book relocation-and our logged number of books removed from shelves but not checked out also dropped by half. Many libraries also track such in-house uses, by tallying the books that need to be reshelved, and the trends are the same.

Maybe students aren’t checking the books out but are still consulting them regularly within the library? This also does not appear to be true. Read: A snapshot of a 21st-century librarian The Association of Research Libraries’ aggregated statistics show a steady decrease of the same proportion across its membership, even as student enrollment at these universities has grown substantially. Overall, across its entire network of libraries, UVA circulated 525,000 books during the 2007–08 school year, but last year there were only 188,000 loans-nearly 1,000 fewer books checked out a day. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.īefore you tsk-tsk today’s kids for their lack of bookishness, note that the trend lines are sliding southward for graduate students and faculty members, too: down 61 percent and 46 percent, respectively, at UVA. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. Yale’s experience is not at all unique-indeed, it is commonplace. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade. Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian-who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system-of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. W hen Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested.

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