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Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

> The university now has an A.I. librarian

Isn't this one of the better uses of AI? Any librarian would have knowledge gaps and bias. Librarian-provided info is best-effort and not considered perfect. They're librarians, not subject matter experts. An AI could give (and cache, since books don't change) summaries of any book, and compare them, far better than a librarian except for niche areas a particular librarian might have read themselves.

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The need for physical libraries is fading anyway. I love books, and I spent many happy hours as a student (a long time ago) in the uni library, doing research the only way you could back then.

But now ...? For STEM, at least, everything is digital. You don't need to go to the stacks to get an old journal article.

And yes, it's sad, and it feels like an era is ending. But that's because it is.

Physical libraries still serve as a place students go to study. It's not about the books, it's having a designated quiet place along with meeting rooms and what not, in addition to computers and printers they can use.

Worth noting that some universities are giving up on the "quiet place" idea, perhaps because (like many public libraries) they think atomized society today desperately needs third places to socialize.

I travel to many universities for conferences and see firsthand that talking is now allowed in some institutions' libraries, with only a small room made available for readers who need quiet.

"For STEM, at least" is doing a lot of work there. In fields like history, archaeology, and linguistics a lot of important research is only on paper. For the last decade, colleagues and I have been scanning publications and uploading them to the shadow libraries, but we have barely scratched the surface.

I imagine a lot of existing library related applications have had the AI label slapped on them.

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