<rant>
I live in the very affluent, educated, liberal city of Newton MA, a city full of professors and other highly educated people
about 30 years ago we built a pretty nice new main library which is only accessible by car . . and we stopped funding the branch libraries, accessible by foot for children and the elderly
The library has been throwing out lots of wonderful books, on the BS claim that there is a lack of shelf space (false) or that a book should be tossed if no one has looked at it in ten years, which IMO is BS
meanwhile the branches are open a few hours a week, struggling to get by on donations
I don't know if, over the years, the number of items checked out per day has gone up or down
but I do know that most of the people actually present at the library are people with laptops
I also know that for the last 30 years the library has used an electronic catalog and the software sucks
