If, on the other hand, (like carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and other tradespeople), library students spent four days a week working, 2 nights (2 hrs a piece) and one day (8 hrs) in classes, and did this for 2 years, I believe that several things (AT LEAST) might be accomplished:

1. MLIS graduates would actually have the skills and knowledge to step right into a job and be useful. (At the very least, they will Not require extensive, exhaustive, frustrating training and help from the paraprofessionals on the job being paid half their salary)

2. The people in the paraprofessional/lower echelons of library service would be there BECAUSE they wanted to progress in the industry, only making customer service and libraries in general better. If the only way to become a librarian is to apprentice as a Library assistant, and be sponsored by a library system, the people who sought libary jobs would be shooting for a career rather than just a “job that sounds easy.”

3. In a trades-apprentice type program, the amount of candidates could be kept even with the amount of positions, and, (speaking of ideal and impractical solutions) everyone would be the best at their job because they had to earn it.

Just some food for thought. Having a lot of experience working in large public libraries is making library school somewhat ridiculous and excruciating. But it also makes me very aware WHY all those newly-graduated hires are so useless and that it really wasn’t their fault. It’s how they were trained before they got here.

Your post is well stated and refreshing. I am the coordinator of an undergraduate Library Information Technology degree program, and an Information Studies department. Our degree program and department actually addresses many of your concerns. Our program and department is run by practicing librarians that also that run our college library. We are both library practitioners and library educators. As practicing librarians that share your views, we made sure to construct our teaching department as a part of the library. Of course we had much more freedom to do this since we are a community college and our librarians are full members of the college faculty.

Our degree program curriculum provides our students with interdisciplinary courses and we require all students in our Associate of Science in Library Information Technology degree to take an information ethics/intellectual freedom class (INFS 2500: Information Ethics and Legal Issues), and a liberal arts class INFS 2600: Ideas, Censorship and Politics that is open to all students at the college. As a result, the library paraprofessionals that graduate from our degree program most likely have more in-depth grounding in the core intellectual freedom/social responsibilities values of the library profession than some graduates of MLIS programs. And like MLIS programs we also infuse the discussion of intellectual freedom/information ethics in our other program classes.

Related to what you say in your library students bill of rights, our library faculty teach a required freshman information literacy class that approaches information literacy from a broad critical perspective, starting out with a serious discussion about the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which information is created, distributed, and organized, and how certain knowledge is privileged and other knowledge is marginalized. We continue to weave this discussion through the entire class. As practicing librarians we have designed an in-depth and comprehensive information literacy program that is required for all liberal arts students, three courses in information studies that are part of the liberal arts curriculum, and an Associate of Science in Library Information Technology degree program. Our MLIS course work did not prepare us to develop curriculum or to teach classes. Many in the library profession continue to argue against librarians developing and teaching credit bearing courses in information literacy or information studies. I would argue that one way to make academic libraries more relevant is for librarians to realize that they have unique and important knowledge to offer the broader society. In academia we have the potential to develop and teach unique classes that students will find engaging and compelling. But in order to develop such classes and programs we need library education to be restructured along the lines discussed by Char in her library students bill of rights. The type of library education that Char has proposed would allow more librarians to develop courses such as our “Ideas, Censorship and Politics,” or Necessary Illusions: A Critical Introduction to the Information Age,” classes. Or to teach classes on information policy and society, or critical information literacy classes.

If the MLIS is to remain a relevant degree major changes need to be made to the curriculum. Our LIT program attempts to prepare library paraprofessionals for the realities of the job they will enter, which means we need to provide them with both the intellectual and theoretical knowledge related to all aspects of the library profession as well as the practical skills they need to do their jobs. As a result, we have created a demanding curriculum that provides both theoretical knowledge as well as practical skills instruction. We also provide an educational framework that situates library work in its broader social context. Because of the very ideas that Char has expressed in her Library Student Bill of Rights, we are currently working on the development of a new course in community outreach and civic engagement that will become a requirement for students in our program. We feel that all library workers should be engaged in community outreach and understand how their library is, or can become, an integral part of the civic life of their community.

Program web site

Course Descriptions

Great insights from Scott and Susan – this is in response to both of you.

Scott, you are right to challenge the suggestion that all library schools ignore the need for curricular revision. My attempt was to write a pithy post that would get people thinking about how library school curriculum does or doesn’t serve their needs, which unfortunately did not list the range of efforts towards this end that are already in progress. Your examples illustrate this point quite well – I love the idea of “professors of practice,” especially. This gets to the heart of the faculty/student disconnect that so many people cite as problematic. I also think your point about what needs to be taken away in order to make room for new foci is an excellent one, and it sounds like in your situation it is being addressed very well. Collection development is definitely an area that I believe should be scaled back as a core competency, in part because of the increasing prevalence of approval purchasing… some may disagree. There are certainly ways to incorporate attention to open access publication and the transition in scholarly communication in general that will make col. dev. more relevant.

As for what librarians don’t do anymore, that’s actually pretty hard to answer – I think we’re doing many of same things but are now expected to think in terms of innovation and experimentation instead of following the “rules” of the game. At least in the public services arena, giving students the opportunity to develop and assess real-world programming and partner with organizations in the field will go a long way. Perhaps employing more contextual analysis and case studies of practice in different areas – showing students how specific libraries respond (or don’t respond) to specific user populations, and so on.

Susan, I think many instructors are making valiant efforts to, like you, work new topics and competencies into old courses – yet another piece of evidence that things need to change.

Your point about teaching students how to develop professionally is critical. There are so many sources for self-education in the library world, from the blogosphere to WebJunction and the like, that I feel there should be more attention paid at the MLIS level to developing student awareness of lifelong learning… a course on career development in general would not be a bad idea. The field is growing increasingly competitive and I think a lot of us really do leave our programs feeling unprepared, especially for landing our first job.

Again, thanks for your responses, and I’m glad to get the perspective of a few practitioners.

Thanks for the list! It will be part of my class online evaluation this year, and I’m sure there will be much talk about it.

Maybe I’ll add it to my 2.0 Week – since none of the classes offer any new technology, I insert a week of it in Humanities Reference just so my students will have a clue when they get to job interviews.

Since my class is one of the few online electives, I get a mix of new grads, second career and second MA students, and special library students along with the public and academic tracks. I encourage them to share their experiences and skills, so they come out of the program with some practical ideas and projects that are relevant to this century.

Every year my students come up with new ideas and valid criticisms, and every year I change the class to reflect their ideas and new issues, both through the formal evaluation and privately.

Why do I do this?

Students are the best judges of what they’ve learned (even if they don’t realized what they learned for a while, ala Piaget).

Students need to know what professional development tools are out there for future growth.

Students know the world is changing, and librarianship with it. It seems only the faculty doesn’t, if they’re not in a library.

I got my MLS five years ago and learned very little if what I needed to know. I learned most of the useful stuff working in a library while getting my MLS, reading, and talking to librarians and archivists. I want my students to get at least a little of that in a class.

So let the debate begin!

Susan

Keep up the good work, and we look forward to seeing you again.

Alan