L&IS Education

Suzanne Hildenbrand wrote in 1999 that the feminist contingent within ALA and ALISE had been silent on the issue of the split between education for library service and education for information services. She wrote that "Having concentrated on either the placement of women in top managerial positions or on cultural issues, ALA's Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship and the Feminist Task Force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table have ignored curricular changes in LIS education." [Library Trends, V.47, #4]

Well, why worry about curricular changes in education? We have to keep up, do we not? Technology is a great way of equalizing access to resources, and that access to resources is part of the mission we as librarians and information professionals propose; access can break down barriers based on ignorance and/or protection of favored status. The networks of communication and information exchange are having a significant impact on our democratic politics, I would argue. Databases that once were only available through specialized services at high fees are now delivered into every home. I could, if I chose, download a book for free to my ipod and listen as I walked ...

But, that is a false dichotomy. The argument is not about all technology or no technology, as some people have framed it. It is about keeping the sociological /human services aspect of librarianship alive in the field. What Hildenbrand points out in her 1999 article is that "As information science courses are increasingly emphasized, other courses are dropped off or shunted aside." [p.675] More courses on librarianship itself are taught by adjunct faculty and she points to children's and youth services education as courses that depend on adjuncts for instructors. What's wrong with adjuncts? Nothing, they bring a significant sense of immediacy to the content they teach. However, they do not conduct research, and so there is little research going on about how librarianship itself works, or doesn't. The research funds go to information science projects.

Is this a gendered discussion? Hildenbrand thinks so ... she points back to studies done before WWI about the need to reduce the amount of female influence in librarianship. She suggests that the emphasis on computers and technology in the field now is another attempt to move women out of the field. She was writing ten years ago ... Is it still true? Well, Steve Abram appears to believe it is time to get rid of "traditional" information services and move into the new information age.

Abram spoke at the ALA Committee on Accreditation meeting with employers of LIS graduates. He called for the removal of "fossils" in the profession and suggested that the SIRSI model of human resources assessment and development was the ideal : three days of psychological testing to qualify for a position at his automation company. I suggested that the civil service laws may have some impact on that, but it wasn't relevant to him; his perspective is narrowed by a career in the private sector. He called for an end to cataloging as well, and improved salaries. He believed that $50,000 was a wholly inadequate salary.

Well, $50,000 doesn't add up to today what it did once upon a time, but his advocacy of the men making 6 figure salaries did not address the persistence of traditional services : library buildings at the heart of local communities. The REFORMA meeting called for caring within the profession, a focus on people. Was Abram referring to the caring as "fossils"? The disconnect between the "L" and the "I" has emerged once again. Perhaps it has something to do with competition for grant funds; perhaps it reflects the need for a more technologically sophisticated practice to expand a market for technology; I suspect it reflects the need of the patriarchal culture to gain more control over the avenues to knowledge that women have developed and maintained -- and technology is just another tool to try and wrest that control away.