Educating Today’s Students for Tomorrow’s Libraries
Remarks given to the Boston SLA Chapter, October 26, 2004
by Michèle V. Cloonan, GSLIS Dean, Simmons College
michele.cloonan@simmons.edu

I.  BACKGROUND AND LANDSCAPE

In 1996-1997, the SLA produced, “Competencies for Special Librarians of the 21^st Century.”[i]  The report took the position that in the Information Age, special librarians require two main types of competencies:

Professional Competencies that relate to the librarian’s knowledge in the areas of information resources, information access, technology, management and research, and “the ability to use these areas of knowledge as a basis for providing library and information services;” and,

Personal Competencies which “represent a set of skills, attitudes, and values that enable librarians to work efficiently; be good communicators; focus on continuing learning throughout their careers; demonstrate the value-added nature of their contributions; and survive in the new world of work.”

The 1996/97 document was aimed at educators, prospective students, practicing special librarians, and managers who are responsible for hiring library and information professionals.  Therefore, it focused on the environment in which library and information professionals operated, and addressed three major shifts that had taken place from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s:

• The transition from paper to electronic media as the dominant form of information storage and retrieval. Also, the convergence of previously separate media, such as text, graphics, and sound, into multimedia resources.

• The increasing demand for accountability, including a focus on customers, performance measurement, benchmarking, and continuous improvement. At the same time, financial resources for LIS services were beginning to shrink.

• New forms of work organization such as end-user computing, work teams, management de-layering, job sharing, telework, outsourcing, downsizing, and re-engineering; (the kinds of trends that were emerging in the early 1980s and described by John Naisbitt in his 1982 book Megatrends).

Gone is the lengthy description of the working environment for Information Professionals, in the 2003 revised Competencies.  Today, we assume that such environments are protean.  Instead, the more recent document focuses on the Information Professional (IP) and the organizations in which IPs work.

An Information Professional is defined as someone who:

strategically uses information in his/her job to advance the mission of the organization. The IP accomplishes this through the development, deployment, and management of organization resources and services. The IP harnesses technology as a critical tool to accomplish goals. IPs include, but are not limited to librarians, knowledge managers, chief information officers, web developers, information brokers, and consultants.

those entities that deliver information-based solutions to a given market.  Some commonly used names for these organizations include libraries, information centers, competitive intelligence units, intranet departments, knowledge resource centers, content management organizations, and others.

The new June 2003 competencies document adds Core Competencies to the mix. Core Competencies are based on the following 2 premises:

            1) Information professionals contribute to the knowledge base of the profession by sharing best practices and experiences, and continue to learn about information products, services, and management practices throughout the life of his or her career.

2) Information professionals commit to professional excellence and ethics, and to the values and principles of the profession.

As a coda to the 2003 report, there is a list of personal competencies, which was prepared by the Competencies Development Committee in January 2004.  I will get back to the issue of competencies later, after I discuss how LIS programs are preparing information professionals to work in the environments described in these competency documents.

II. FROM THE LANDSCAPE TO THE META-SCAPE

As SLA’s thinking has evolved in the way it has looked at the landscape of the profession, so library and information science (LIS) programs have been sensitive to this evolution, and therefore have adapted their curricula to the new and shifting landscape.  And as SLA and other professional organizations have re-examined their core missions, so too have LIS master’s degree programs.

About fifteen years ago, there was a debate among educators about what constituted the “core” of LIS. Some programs abandoned the core altogether; others reduced it. Why was there such “core angst”?  There are four related reasons.

First, as the profession has expanded and grown, we have needed to add to our electives.  To cite just a few examples: Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Information Architecture, Cyberspace Law, Intellectual Property, Digital Libraries, and so on. Because the profession has never been able to agree (unlike our counterparts in law schools) how long a master’s program should be, we struggle to provide students with the greatest possible number of offerings that our resources will allow. Thus a conundrum is born.  For example, some employers would like our graduates to have taken more management and leadership courses. Drawing from the Simmons GSLIS catalog, we offer 8-10 courses in each of these tracks. Yet students can only take a total of nine to twelve 4- and 2-unit courses. Thus, even as we add new electives, we have to prepare students to be continuous learners, and to take courses throughout their careers.

Second, the core angst has emerged because the more core courses one must take, the fewer electives one may take. This leads to angst because employers want our students to have everything: more management, more technology, and so forth, and there is hardly room in the program for all these desiderata. 

Third, angst was generated because of the removal of the word “library” from some of the programs.  This had led in some cases to core identity crises, the most striking example of which occurred at the University of California at Berkeley, where the school reorganized itself into the School of Information Management and Systems, and ultimately decided not to remain an ALA-accredited program.  They now focus instead more closely on the economics of information, distributed computing applications, and analysis of information systems then do other LIS programs.  When you take “library” or “library and information science” out of the school name and replace it with “information, on the other hand, you also risk broadening your horizon so much that it is impossible to have a core.  (In the case of Berkeley, they recently implemented an extensive core of 6 courses.)

Finally, in some schools the adoption or deletion of core courses distracted faculty from a more fundamental issue: student learning outcomes.  Learning outcomes become professional competencies.  Therefore, as schools develop student learning outcomes, they should be working in concert with professional associations.

After grappling with “core issues” in the 1990s, today nearly every accredited LIS program embraces the core as an educational concept. In most schools it entails taking three or four core courses. These usually are some combination of Organization of Information, Access to Information, Management, Research, Systems Analysis, and Information Users and Information Society.  These are pretty close to the professional competencies that SLA has identified. At Simmons we have just added a fourth core course to our Organization/Access/Management triad: Information Technology.

LIS programs are now stronger than ever; they have resolved their identity issues, and they have been able to re-embrace the core concept. Yet each program has a distinct approach.  In preparation for this talk, I looked at the course offerings of seven programs:  Illinois, Syracuse, Michigan, Washington, UCLA, North Carolina—Chapel Hill, and Indiana, and compared them to Simmons. I wanted to see how a student interested in pursuing an IP career in special libraries might devise a program of study.

First, I did the obvious thing: I checked to see which of these schools has a course with the phrase corporate or special libraries in the title. (At Simmons we call this course “Organization and Management of Corporate Libraries.”)  Of the seven comparison schools, four did, with the various titles of: “Special Libraries,” (UCLA), “The Information Industry,” (Indiana), “Special Libraries and Knowledge Management,”  (Chapel Hill), and “Special Librarianship,” (Washington).

What accounts for the lack of a “Special Libraries” course in some schools?  For one thing, there has been a move away from types-of-libraries courses (e.g. public, academic, special). Instead, some programs are focusing on helping students develop the skills and traits that students will need to work in a variety of institutions.  For example, at both Simmons and Michigan, the phrase management of often appears in course titles.

Also, in schools that do not have a “Special Libraries” course, there is usually a course with the title, “Business Information Resources.”  At Syracuse this course is called, “Business Information Resources and Strategic Intelligence.”

What does all this signify?  Two different but complementary things:

Many schools are focusing on competencies of an MLS program rather than courses that focus on institutional types.  These schools reason that students may find themselves in any of a number of different institutional types, as both SLA Competencies documents suggest.

However, I believe it also means that today’s students must receive more rigorous advising, as well as professional mentoring. All too often, these days, students prefer to take the Dim Sum or Swedish smorgasbord approach to course selection.

It is fine to focus on competencies, and to give students options, but as educators we must also strive to impart intellectual coherency into the process.  Otherwise, students’ programs will but a dim sum of all the various parts.

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