At the risk of making this sound like The Four Yorkshiremen, at least the president where you worked paid lip service to the value of the library. The director I worked for–the man who was head of the entire campus library system–made his disdain for libraries quite clear. He started his directorship with a talk about how, because of the internet, the “physical library” would be completely obsolete in just ten years. He predicted this in 1998, and I think seeing it fail to happen frustrated him, so he tried to make it happen by encouraging university administrators to cut the library’s budget. He even balked at paying for handicapped access, because, he said, there was no need for it.
I’m sorry to go on at such length. It just still astounds me that someone who’d spent his entire career working in libraries had such an intense hatred of libraries.
