Do take my words about where exactly the books are going with a grain of salt. I believe there was only a few sentences about that part in the email. Either way, its very frustrating because a lot of our books were donations, and some are donations from people who are no longer with us. To take those somewhere else would be such a slap in the face to those people

Haha, I do not mind in the slightest! The information is very helpful and I appreciate you for sharing it.

Just because you say it worked for everyone doesn't mean it actually did. I'm an MFA Student, and I TA'd for a completely asynchronous class last semester. There were a lot of students that struggled, and some who just didn't hand assignments in.

Assignments aside, I personally don't remember a lot from the classes I took during the beginning of the pandemic. Sure, students might have been there, but did they actually learn anything?

Just because something is "good enough" doesn't mean its better. And in our Campus, some of the Librarians were already told that their last days are in July when the merger goes into effect.

It's important to speak out against this because its completely unnecessary. Its trying to fix something that is not broken, and making it worse in the process.

The change.org petition has nearly 500 signatures, so clearly a lot of Vermonters disagree with what you have to say.

Just because it worked for you doesn't mean it works for everybody. The nature of learning is that everyone does it differently. Having E-Books as an option? Thats great! But it should be a choice, not the standard.

I'm not knowledgeable on the sports side of things, but on the library side of things, you will find that this decision is way more costly than keeping things as they are. An institution that values learning in any capacity should understand that not everybody wants to stare at a screen all day.

The concept of course its not new. But the actual real decision that is affecting my campus and the other VSU campuses is.

I cannot thank you and every other Librarian in this thread for giving this information. I am writing a paper about how awful of a decision this is and how incredibly important Libraries are for everyone, and this is so incredibly important. For the google form petition that I created, I plan on attaching every comment written out by people to the end of the paper.

So I only bring up the libraries here, but the news we received also highly impacted our sports teams as well. I don't really mention it just because I don't understand it further than it absolutely screws them over. This link is to the post that was made further explaining the decisions. That is a really good point you made. I don't have any idea of what Grewal did before he became VSU's president

We have so many books in our library on the Johnson Campus that are pieces of history. Countless texts that 100% would NOT be available in a digital medium. They say they will "donate" the books, but no matter what happens to the books themselves, that is still so much information that is being taken away from students. It breaks my heart that this is even being considered.

Gosh, I can imagine! It's like, how are they planning on getting those E-Books? Will they create an entirely new platform, or are they planning on outsourcing and using a company? In which case, that brings an uncomfortable amount of control over which books we are able to access.

The entire plan is way more costly than how they are currently run, and all in a flawed notion of "progress."

And the crazy part is those resources- we already had a lot of them! We have access to JSTOR, and a ton of researching resources. I don't know how all of that will be affected with the merger.

Right, thats a really good point. They kept reiterating that "the interlibrary loan will still exist", but how will they accomplish that if they can only take and not give?

Exactly! Thank you so much for your point of view. This doesn't save ANY money, in fact its going to cost so much more. The only money "saved" is from the librarians they want to lay off in July. The cost of removing all of the books, and the shelves, and remodeling the area would be so much more than what they would "save"

Thank you very much! There is nothing good that can come out of getting rid of the actual books. This was a decision that was made completely without the input of students OR faculty/staff.