Libraries of earlier times were primarily collections of (paper) books. Nowadays, many things which may have been previously stored on paper are found in databases on servers. A "digital transformation" is largely complete.

There are lots of different sorts of books

When modern people think of books, people often think of types like novels or "non-fiction" books—documents on history, politics, etc.

Likewise, we have practical books like cookbooks and manuals. Many (most?) people don't bother using paper books for these. Instead, they'll look up recipes online, access the most recent documentation for some machine...

Digital assets

Another type of "library" is an (originally) digital collection. Libraries of digital assets can be things like,

• Software libraries
• 3D textures, models
• Stock images

Artists might buy reference books full of many images of a particular type—e.g. birds, swordsman poses

Once you have a useful set of pre-made things, you can compose them in ways that are useful to you provided you have the necessary skill. Libraries save time because you don't have to re-do "re-inventing the wheel" or doing "original research" (which can be costly and time consuming).

The dangers of (digital) centralization

The new digital way of doing libraries has a lot of problems. Crucially, if a "client-server" setup where you access a library through your terminal (e.g. smartphone, web browser), you do not control the resources you are accessing. While practically, we cannot control everything we use—the modern way is to be in a highly networked world—certain stuff which we access everyday is probably best left de-centralized.

One example of this is a "music library". Nowadays, many people turn over their music listening to a service like Spotify. What happened to having a curated collection of carefully selected things to listen to? Now somebody else can alter your music collection remotely.

Centralized control means that 3rd parties (big corporations, governments) can control what information people have access to. Obviously, this can be used to "control the narrative", to-down.

"You don't know what you're missing"

People born into this system of digital centralized control will not have the same experiences of browsing libraries, open forums of discussion, and other more organic means of discovery.

Rather, information is being fed to people like how a guided tour seeks to contextualize and control how visitors see some place.