Norman Tanis

Norman Tanis was born in 1929 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As dean of the library at CSUN from 1969 to 1990, he oversaw its expansion from a collection of 300,000 volumes to over a million at the time of the interview. The library also added two wings to the library under his administration, adding one hundred and ten thousand square feet to the extant building, and implemented the Automated Storage and Retrieval System, in which books would be placed in densely packed deep storage from which they could be quickly recalled. He also founded the library's Special Collections and Archives, and created the Santa Susana Press, which published fine limited-edition books. Tanis was interviewed by John Broesamle as source material for his book Suddenly a Giant: A History of California State University, Northridge (Northridge: Santa Susana Press, 1993). He passed away in 2010.