Comments on: Library As Place – For Air Conditioning Books

By: On Being Valuable: Point-Counterpoint

On Being Valuable: Point-Counterpoint — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 04:07:58 +0000

[...] find an academic administrator who would go on record trashing the academic library (well, maybe this one). But none of that may stop administrators, when push comes to shove, from taking drastic measures [...]

By: Disruptive Technology Alert

Disruptive Technology Alert — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:57:43 +0000

[...] Sannier of Arizona State University. You’ll recall he’s the CIO who suggested that all academic libraries could be burned down tomorrow. Sannier already believes all the world’s books have been [...]

By: McQuay Parts guy

McQuay Parts guy — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:42:40 +0000

I’m a pretty tech savvy person, but when I read something, I like to hold it in my hands, not scroll up and down a screen. I love the library beacuse it is hands on, as well as high tech. Sannier’s ideas for burning down the libraries are a little extreme.

By: ASU Faculty

ASU Faculty — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:09:07 +0000

ASU TechProfessional has it absolutely right. Sannier, like ASU’s president, likes to make dramatic, uninformed statements–and loves the attention. But ASU’s administration has been a disaster for the university, which is facing an Enron-like future (a function of Enron-like ethical practices), because of a series of bizarre, eye-catching “experiments.” And President Crow is deeply anti-intellectual, consciously seeking non-PhD, non-university background people for his senior administration. Crow, and Sanier, and their ilk have been catastrophic for the university.

By: ASU TechProfessional

ASU TechProfessional — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 03:29:07 +0000

Horrid to think that librarians would assume Sannier has ideas, is an IT professional, or should be taken seriously. He stepped into academia as a best-friend/unqualified hire of a president who also had slim background in any kind of scholarly life.
Should we worry that higher education is increasingly becoming a bottom-line business, run by grubby anti-intellectuals? Should we confuse them with men of vision for a new university? No.

Yes, Sannier is serious. Yes, he’s uninformed and gets all his ideas from “Google University” thinking. Yes, our best approach is to acknowledge more anti-scholarship cads are taking over the administrative offices of HE and we need strategies to fight back. Or all is lost and Google will align with WalMart and shut down libraries, reading, thinking, and scholarship.

By: Kyri Freeman

Kyri Freeman — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:06:40 +0000

Does Sannier really think that all the books in the world have been digitized, or is he just dismissing literature, as well as the many subjects in which most current scholarship is still published in print book format, as irrelevant? Whatever he thinks, he isn’t much of a reader himself, or he’d be aware that most people find reading large amounts of text on a computer screen uncomfortable and inconvenient. Many of our students do not even have computers of their own.

I’m getting weary of the technofetishist approach to education as a whole and information in particular. All that has to happen is one power outage and these guys will be literally back in the Dark Ages.

By: nick l.

nick l. — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:50:00 +0000

When I was in library school we heard a great story. A researcher was in the library with a stack of old parchment documents, letters written during the Revolutionary War. He would lift one of these letters up to his face, sniff, and then jot something down in his notebook. After a while, the person relating the story went up to him and aksed him about this rather interesting activity. He explained that at the time, people believed vinegar to be an effective treatment against airborne diseases, and when people wrote letters from a town where a certain disease was (like TB or something), they would sprinkle their letters with vinegar. By sniffing these letters, he could tell which letters had been sprinkled with vinegar, and thus which towns had outbreaks and when. So while the actual words in the letters could be digitized, the smell of vinegar couldn’t. Had someone decided it would be a good idea to just digitize them and toss them – after all, why bother air-conditioning them when we can have facsimilies – a whole piece of history would have been lost.

By: Marilyn R. Pukkila

Marilyn R. Pukkila — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:45:25 +0000

Someone should tell him about our students who, when they find an e-book in our collections, ask if they can borrow a print copy of it from another library!

By: deg farrelly

deg farrelly — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:18:49 +0000

“Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, Indiana. Those guys have digitized their collections. What have you got that they havenâ€™t got? ”

How about an OCLC World Cat analysis of what’s unique in our collections?

By: Celia Rabinowitz

Celia Rabinowitz — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:48:48 +0000

Barbara got it just right! My first thought was that we are working with faculty and students to move in the directions he is talking about (in general), but they are, in fact, often much more reluctant to make dramatic change than we are.

Librarians have been skewered for not doing what patrons want or assuming we know what patrons want. Sannier is doing the same thing. Does he really know what is best for our patrons (on our individual campuses with their individual missions and needs)?

As a result, the few good or provocative ideas actually get lost, in my opinion anyway, in the hyperbole which does more to generate push back than it does creative and innovative thinking.