Something has to go.

Local councils hereabouts have (as yet vague) plans to close several libraries, and this has created a lot of correspondence in the local press - the majority of it critical.  Now I used to use my local library a lot, but the reality is that I haven't visited it now for getting on for a year - so why?   Well, firstly, reference - in the past, if I wanted to know something or research something, the library was my first port of call, but now (and this of course goes back well beyond twelve months) my first port of call is the internet.  The library seem to have recognised this, because as computer usage has grown, the size and scope of their reference section has dwindled.  But more recently, my purpose in visiting the library was to get books out - and here is the second problem, because a library, particularly a relatively small local one like ours, only has a limited stock of books, and not much rotation, so I very quickly got to the stage where I couldn't find anything I wanted to take out that I hadn't already read, and stopped going.  So if they close our library, I shall miss it, but not all that much, which raises the question - have libraries started to outlive their usefulness, or have they perhaps failed to satisfactorily move with the times?