One of the sad realities about physical libraries is that they are dying, at least in American university systems that have been parasitized by management consulting firms.

For instance, Georgia Tech recently moved their physical collection to off-campus stacks shared with Emory University, and both the University of South Carolina and Texas A&M University systems are downsizing collections and moving towards an access model reliant on the ILL system. The A&M system has even gone further and largely eliminated tenure for librarians. Other university systems, like the one in my snall state, have started to push checking out ebooks over physical books in various ways, possibly in preparation for more drastic changes like this, or at least so that they can begin downsizing their collections

This doesn't just affect students at universities, since many public institutions have historically offered community borrowing, and often have extremely rare books that simply aren't available otherwise

It's a complicated issue since this phenomenon is driven partly by user demand -- students are reading much less than they used to, and far less in the way of physical books, and university systems are responding to changes in demand. It's still sad to see