Office Hours: Seek a Challenge

My new “Office Hours” column is up at LJ. It’s about challenges:

http://bit.ly/f0PuQe

Slackers not wanted
At a recent focus group for a research project for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives conference, a small group of librarians and library IT support staff shared their insights about the changing educational landscape. They all agreed that the requirements for supporting a university’s mission are changing, just as our students are changing (see “Can We Handle the Truth?” Office Hours, LJ 1/11, p. 44). One librarian noted a particular challenge: “some librarians are coasting to retirement—they’ve checked out.”

Coasting, in library school and in our jobs, is not an option. Sending students who have coasted through their LIS program to your library to coast perpetuates this problem. I can tell which students are merely sailing through their program, just as I can tell when a professor has “checked out” of his or her own job.

Students—are you doing the bare minimum in your LIS program? Are you turning in “good enough” papers that show no excitement, curiosity, or passion for librarianship? Or are you going above and beyond the expectations of your teachers? You get what you bring to your program.

We can’t force you to learn or open your mind to the future possibilities of libraries. And, yes, you may get an okay or better grade for just coasting, depending on your teacher; grade inflation is alive and well in many LIS programs. A friend and colleague said of such slackers, “The field can’t afford them, I don’t want to teach them.” Amen.