You don't even need to get that sketchy. With services like ACM providing their research libraries at student prices, you can have all sorts of papers easily downloaded from the comfort of your dorm/whatever.

Personally, I only really went to the library when I was doing Master's research, and there were a few specific books I needed on graph theory. Went in, got them, and that was it. Everything else I was able to easily and legally do online.

When I needed books from my Uni library, I normally had to request them from stacks, so I didn't even need to go into the library to get them. I'd just order them the night before, they get delivered at 8am, and I pick them up at the library front desk.

> When I needed books from my Uni library, I normally had to request them from stacks, so I didn't even need to go into the library to get them.

Is that for reserved course items? A library where you had to request everything would be completely useless. In my experience you miss out on 80% of interesting books if you do not browse the shelves. Amazon, Worldcat, etc are useless for discovery, particularly for anything published before 1980. Google Books is a little better. Frequently when visiting a new city or town I will drop in on a library to browse the mathematics shelves and take note of any interesting books I should read later. Used bookstores are also interesting but most have no math books.

Out of curiosity, what were you working on to do with graph theory?

I never actually finished my project; life got in the way. However, I was learning about applications of pathfinding. My eventual goal was to define and implement an algorithm to find the best routes for a flight plan, taking into account time, fuel burn, etc.

Well, I finished my studies without borrowing a single (studying-related) thing from a library. We didn't have time to read whole books anyway, due to the way the curriculum is structured, and whatever textbook I needed to consult, I had available as a bootleg PDF on an FTP server we maintained for ourselves and those who'll come after us.

I went through years of undergrad without using the library once. It's really not much of a mystery how I did it. I bought a lot of books that were good, our Uni library gives us access to something like 100'000 books in PDF (well, I guess you could call that a 'visit' to the library) and the rest can be downloaded from the internet. Besides, lots of lectures had very good handouts and ain't nobody got time to read a lot of technical books.

We live in a society where almost everybody's first instinct when looking up facts is: "Google it". And the second: "Check Wikipedia". It really isn't astonishing that students have the same attitude when they first arrive, and I think it's the university's job to get them to change that habit. (Of course there will always be those too lazy to do anything but check Wikipedia, but most can be taught.)

Sprinkle JSTOR on top, and you've got 90% of my undergraduate history papers.

We really need to get onto better digitizing and indexing of libraries.

Digitizing and indexing only solves part of the problem. The real problem is the lack of search skills, even among people who think they know how to search for things. There is also the knowledge that some databases are better for certain subjects because there isn't one "omni-database" that has a representative amount from all subject areas.

I can highly recommend "The Oxford Guide of Library Research" by Thomas Mann.

I had no idea how many different ways to research a library there are. Or how many of them are not available in my local university library, because the research interfaces have been dumbed down.

Mann is not a fan of the Internet and its reduction to a single search box.