My point is that libraries have long provided these services (and much more) and the only major change in these two in particular that’s occurred because of technology is the way in which these services are delivered or made available.

If you are looking at this from the view of the library as a physical space, then yes, you may have good grounds to argue that the central role for educational purposes isn’t there today (although I would argue against that point of view, too). In other words, much of the “action” is in e-resources rather than in traditional collections. This is why I think it is so important for the library to have a highly visible role in any institutional webspace — because they are now providing virtual services that are, by and large, heavily used. These include full text databases for journal articles, e-books, and other licensed online content. The proportion of library materials budgets being spent on these things is growing exponentially and now stands somewhere between 30 and 40% for the large academic and research libraries. Just because these services are online doesn’t negate the value of the library to education. In fact, it only serves to reinforce that perspective.

As far as the availability of information on the Internet via search engines like Google, it is true that there is a lot of information out there that is accessible and free. However the vast majority of educational/scholarly information is absolutely NOT freely available still and is only accessible if a university library has paid for access to that information via a proprietary or vendor-supplied service. And even though a lot more information is freely available now than in the past to those who know how to navigate the Internet, that doesn’t mean that it is readily findable, organized, relevant, or trustworthy.

A key point here that sometimes gets missed is how critical and fundamental (mission critical) a library’s website is in this day and age. Sure, generally circulation and gate counts in academic libraries are going down. On the other hand, I suspect that unless a library has really messed things up, their website traffic, in contrast, is going way up. Management in libraries needs to have a clear sense of the website being central to the delivery of library services, not ancillary. Too many people still think of their library’s website as an add-on. It isn’t. (Or rather, it shouldn’t be.)