You may have seen this article making the rounds online. It’s from The Atlantic, by Dr. Dan Cohen, Dean of the Library at Northeastern University, and it’s worth a read. Cohen does a good job teasing apart the tensions between the fact of declining usage of print books, and the real attachment that many people (of all ages) feel to print-filled library stacks. He articulates important contextual factors, such as the changing nature of scholarship, and the increasing demand for study space. It’s a nuanced essay that you may find useful if you are encountering strongly-held feelings about changes to library spaces.
Cohen concludes by arguing that we should resist rigid, nostalgic conceptualizations of what the library should be. An idea we should question, he argues, is:
“the research library as a Disneyland of books, with banker’s lamps and never-cracked spines providing the suggestion of, but not the true interaction with, knowledge old and new. As beautiful as those libraries appear—and I, too, find myself unconsciously responding to such surroundings, having grown up studying in them—we should beware the peril of books as glorified wallpaper.”