Bangor University is proposing to sack eight of its 12 librarians because students can find the information they need on the internet.
Bangor, which is part of the University of Wales, has become the focus of a national campaign to save the "Bangor eight" as unions fear the cuts could be replicated in university libraries elsewhere.
A consultation document issued by the university last month proposed a £300,000 money saving package that would see he current total of 12 librarians cut to one cataloguer, an acquisitions expert, a chief librarian and a law librarian.
It blames the "precarious" financial position of the university for the changes and suggests that new technology will replace "user help desk" provision.
The document reads: "The support to the academic and student communities from the qualified subject librarians, whatever its contribution to the teaching and research roles of the institution, is hard to justify in value-for-money terms at a time when the process of literature searches is substantially deskilled by online bibliographical resources."
Among those who could face the sack is the librarian for social science, business studies, psychology and lifelong learning, Eileen Tilley, who is also the president of the institution's Association of University Teachers.
Today she told EducationGuardian.co.uk that the proposals would undermine the university's ambitions and leave one librarian for every 2,000 students, compared with the one to 400 ratio that national organisations recommend.
"The structure is more appropriate to a further education college than a university. [The university] say they want to be Russell group research-led institution, they can't do that without us.
"The university thinks that because we have the internet it no longer needs skills teaching, that people can do literature searches themselves. I would say this has, in fact, complicated the resources. They need librarians to guide you through it. So many students think they can do those searches on Google. That's not true. Users are confused and need guiding through this."
David Roberts, the university's registrar, said: "We're engaged in a consultation exercise with staff and students and no decisions have been taken yet.
"The reasons for the changes are set out in our consultation document and we're genuinely listening to what the staff and students would say about it."
The campaign to save the librarians is being backed by the AUT at a national level. A spokesman said today that it was "worried" the model of restructuring could be replicated elsewhere.