Good Grief
"After the First and following the Second World War, the attempt was made to underpin the supposed failure by University libraries with other arguments as, for example, the initiative that was lacking among professional librarians in providing for contacts with professors and students and the resultant lack of acquaintance with the real needs of users, the librarians’ expertise that was lacking in the ever more differentiating special areas of the professorships, the unwieldy nature of university libraries that had become too large for the acquisitions, and making available the literature, and yes, even the transfer of the university libraries to the storage, or closed stacks system, and to the numerus currens arrangement, which made direct access to the collection impossible for the professors and necessitated their going the roundabout way through the catalogs.”