The keys to the kingdom
OKAY, SO MAYBE as a mid-career librarian I'm still fairly new to the new paradigm. But since when did LIS students and 'new professionals' (and I use the term warily here) have as much to tell us as we had to tell them?
Unsurprisingly, as my fiftieth birthday hurtles toward me I have been thinking a great deal lately about my place in the chrono-professional continuum. By this point in my career I might be expected to be something of an all-knowing sage. But I haven't learned this much about my profession in this short a span since I was in library school.
This soul-searching has been amplified by working alongside a younger coworker who now is also a newly-enrolled library school student. As a result I've been paying a lot more attention to what I do and what I know (or don't!), and how I present and teach it, and how it's all being received. It's one of the keener professional privileges to have the opportunity to mentor. But it's also just a little humbling.
It's still commonplace to knock library school as less than challenging or engaging. This is done most often by those (like myself) who weren't challenged by library school. For the record, this is not so much a reflection of innate intelligence as the poverty of ones alma mater. The cliché was always that you could only learn so much at library school; the greater balance could only be learned on the job. Unchecked this dismissiveness can be self-perpetuating: My mentor (Wisconsin, 1952?) often disparaged the library degree as merely 'the union card'. For his time this attitude doesn't particularly surprise me.
And when I think of the proto-Internet days of my library education, I am reminded that library science was not yet traveling at the speed of byte; we weren't that far removed from the punch card era. (Remember when Boolean operators were our WYSIWIG?) For all the foundation we received in traditional library basics, we at Columbia never knew there might be another way to learn the ropes -- not at least until we got to the 'real world' and discovered all those bright and knowledgeable graduates of other LIS programs. (There were, of course, standouts in my class -- you know who you are -- and I expect each and every one will respond with an aggrieved rejoinder.)
(Even as I was writing my post, Jennifer Macaulay was posting a sober and insightful appraisal of her own LIS Education which both confirms and belies my assessments here.)
It's easy to compare my library school education (Columbia University GSLIS [r.i.p.], 1981-84) to my younger colleague's. There are still some aspects that do not seem to have changed in twenty-two years ... or fifty-four, for that matter. I must say I find this disheartening. New concepts and approaches haven't yet reached all the way into the curriculum at all the (remaining) library schools.
One bit of encouraging news I have noticed comes from the changing nature of library literature. Back in the 'eighties reviewing lib lit was mostly a valuable exercise of tracking down references and familiarizing ourselves with the standard journals. What we found there was often pretty dull stuff: often outdated, it was presented as faits-accomplis by all-knowing strangers. Article indexing was slow to keep up with the literature. Hardly the stuff of inspiration. But nowadays scholarly print publishing is frequently supplemented by and will soon be entirely supplanted by e-journals. (Even so, I'm not convinced it's of any higher quality than it ever was, but that's somebody else's blog-fodder.) And how great is it to be able to used hotlinked citations to follow up on an author's train of thought?
I am particularly heartened that so much of the practical and inspirational library literature is coming from the LIS students themselves -- madly blogging away, questioning and learning and sharing, applying and sometimes improving upon what they've been told. I'm particularly pleased by that questioning part. I don't believe we were expected to be heard from, which probably didn't much help our appreciation of our chosen profession. While there's still plenty to teach the students, I'd like to think that there's a looping back to the library faculty and to the profession as a whole.
I write this in part to let the fresher faces among us know why they might be encountering such intransigence among their elders. In our defense, we never had it this good! Luckily for me this chance to teach has also been an education for me, allowing me to rediscover the joys (yes, and frustrations) or being a student again. Except, perhaps, for being a little wiser.
<Photo source UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Services>
