I just finished --very much behind the curve--Eric Klinenberg's Palaces of the People, and of course I liked it. It gives pride of place to libraries in the evolving social structure of the 20th century in the United States, and of difficulties since. So why wouldn't I like that? I was still left with some questions (and maybe Klinenberg will continue on this subject in his future work).
Klinenberg focused on public libraries, and that's an important feature and caveat at once. My sister (now retired) was director of an urban public library in Michigan for twenty-four years, and I saw first hand how physical infrastructure, service commitments, political savvy, and sheer determination assisted in revitalizing Muskegon, Michigan --still a town with difficulties, but with a splendid public library. Deborah Fallows has noted that libraries are where you need to go if want to find out what is really happening in a town, that libraries often are the first institutions that take action to fill gaps in a community." I've seen this truth with my own eyes in a wide variety of locations. The three locations of Hamden Public Library (CT) are centers of the whole community, and alive with activity.
What about academic libraries? As Joshua Kim noted, "Klinenberg knows that academic libraries are under a quiet attack from every quarter of academia." I suspect that the old saw the "we don't need libraries now that we have the internet (or Amazon)" has finally begun to wear out, but there are many challenges to academic libraries, not just budgets.
In reality, libraries have made their services and technologies so seamless and transparent that users are often unaware that libraries have contributed to their success. I have heard some of my own faculty say, "I don't use the library; I get everything I need on the internet," blissfully unaware that they are finding things exactly because librarians did a lot of work behind the veil, as it were, to make sure that our users have access to expensive resources.
Then there's another old saw, "Students don't read books anymore." Funny --I remember faculty complaining about the growing lack of student reading in the early 1970s. I suspect t'was ever thus, and without doubt the advent of digital distractions has cut into paper book circulations. But if public library circulations are up, and printed book sales are up, where are all those books going? Pew Research surveys have shown that young people are more likely to use libraries and borrow books than many of their elders --but not college students? huh?
On a university campus, what I see is this: students use the library physical space both to stay on task, and to do so in the proximity of their friends. It is social capital, in Klinenberg's sense, but indirect. The good students want to keep up with the other good students: they do that through their studies, and many of them do that in the library, regardless how they interact (or don't) with library resources and services. The library also provides access to workstations and printers that some students lack: it is a relative leveller in an academic society that, like wider society, continues to stratify.
The question, do "good students" use the library, or do they become (and remain) "good students" because they use the library? What does "using" the library mean --space, context, resources, services, technology, or some personal amalgam of all the above? And what is a "good student" anyway? --is that just a proxy for academic high achievers, or can a student be "good" in a way not wholly described by grades? What about the student whose mind or heart is actually changed by something she learns through study, regardless how that is measured in cumulative academic assessment? (Is there any way even to know this?) Those spaces need not be "palaces" --a slightly misleading metaphor, though well-intentioned. But the spaces need to be adequate. Not every campus can afford a library space that wins architectural awards, and not every campus should.
I think that an emphasis upon cumulative academic assessment --GPA, etc.--and the question, how much of that is influenced by library services and resources and spaces?-- is too narrow. What an academic library might best provide is a space to be in process, to be different, really to grow or learn, to project or experiment with new ways for a student to be in the world, in the future. This is almost impossible to measure and so falls by the wayside of an academic culture increasingly dominated by numerical assessments, evidence-based practice, and "closing the circle" from assessment to improvement, "excellence and innovation in teaching" as my institution puts it. Good academic library spaces can offer (in an economic metaphor) affordances for such assessment, but so much more.
The digital library space can offer something similar --diluted or strengthened--to distance learners as well. I take Joshua Kim's reproof that online education is much more than MOOCs. At my library we work very hard to make sure that our services to online services match what we do for on-ground students, both in quality and resources. Some of our students taking online courses are in fact enrolled in on-ground university curricula. We have done online consultation sessions with students who are physically located upstairs or in the neighboring buildings. It is a challenge and a growth point to figure out how to be library fully in the digital space, a conundrum because these days no one is in the physical library space without interaction with the digital. No one is using a paper-only library on a university campus these days.
Campus social infrastructure is evolving, as well as off-campus. Different kinds of spaces on campus (maker-spaces, for example) are thriving and fostering a social capital in a manner not quite seen before --similar to what has gone on, but also different, and better (I hope!). I agree with Kim, Klinenberg, Barbara Fister that libraries are an essential social infrastructure. The question remains whether those who control the institution's fiscal resources will agree. One of the principle weaknesses of academic libraries lies in that dissonance: those who make the most important decisions about the level of funding for an academic library never actually use the academic library themselves. When did you last seen a President or Provost in the stacks, or reading, or even interacting with others in the building? What senior staff leadership sees, and what users see, can be quite different.