• AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social
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    1 month ago

    No, no. It’s dumber:

    The library is still open, you can freely enter. But now they’ve put “a guy” in the library to whom you can pay money and they will answer your question with the stuff they “more or less remember”.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      This isn’t just with projects either

      I was looking at property records and property lines for my state yesterday to try to resolve a question that my mom had regarding land that she was getting.

      The first two and a half pages of search results are all websites where you have to pay a subscription fee in order to get the land owner’s information.

      This is all information that is provided by my state free of charge via their website. I had to filter through two and a half pages before I found the original source of the information that all of those websites are leeching off.

      It’s ridiculous the amount of paid services that use free-to-use services, it’s just they pay more of an advertising, so therefore they’re the only thing the user sees.

      If I hadn’t already known that the state provided it free a charge to anyone who asked or went on their website anyway, I likely would have figured it just cost money to request the records.

    • Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      They also fired most of the librarians (search engines) and set fire to parts of it causing everything to get shuffled around.

      Sure you can get to books (sites) you know of, good luck finding obscure ones or special ones now that aren’t junk or spam magazines however.