Greta’s tweet triggered instant anger & humorless laughing for me, so I’m glad someone took the time to explain why she’s wrong. I’ve been in several university libraries & none of them are vanity projects in any way.
This morning, media personality Greta Van Susteren tweeted out:
Colleges should stop building vanity projects like huge libraries and billing students-full libraries are on our smartphones! https://t.co/QBeVKZvIKZ
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) October 31, 2016
A vanity project? Hah! No library I’ve ever worked in could be called a “vanity project.”
The tweet was in response to a Yahoo Finance article: College is Still Getting More Expensive: What Can Stop It?
No real surprises here: College is too expensive and yes, debt is a concern for most students and families–something that most of us agree with.
The comment about smartphones? A flippant remark that reveals a real lack of understanding about academic research and how information is accessible to students.
But a vanity project? A 2012 article on InsideHigherEd.com reported that library budgets as a percentage of the total university budget had fallen from a high of 3.83% in 1974…
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How can anyone assert such thing about the necessity of the library in our present information driven world. That shows that, despite the obvious roles libraries play in academic institutions in particular and societies at large, many are yet apprehend the inevitability of libraries in any sane society. I guess we librarians still have a lot of work to do. And I guess the above reply is part of it. Thanks for the post.