The Arkansas School

by John Berry III -- Library Journal, 1/1/1998

Maybe we should make every new MLS spend a semester in Little Rock

There's more to learn in Little Rock. More than you'll get about managing a public library from those graduate programs we used to call library schools. I talked about that sad state of affairs over the phone with Bobby Roberts, LJ's 1997 Librarian of the Year (see p. 44-46) and director of the Central Arkansas Library System. I was so taken with the political and managerial wisdom of that Arkansas librarian, politician, and scholar, that I'm going down to Little Rock to see for myself what Roberts and the Arkansas librarians have accomplished.

"To be honest," Roberts admitted at one point, "I'm not even sure what I learned in library science school to help me in this job. What I'm doing here doesn't involve me with what I learned there." Later Roberts said, "Library schools don't teach you what to do when the city won't give you the money. They don't tell you what to do when a wonderful, 25-year employee suddenly goes crazy over some personal problem."

This is not just another cheer for "practice" in the "theory vs. practice" debate that still rages between our academics and the librarians they once taught. It is not another mournful groan because you can't just plug that new MLS into a front-line job without some on-the-job education.

This is a plea to our American Library Association-accredited graduate programs to bring the library and the society it serves back into the classroom. It is a plea to try to teach public sector politics and management through case studies built from reality, from the history of how libraries got the way they are, through the established and respected discipline not of information but of public administration. It is a plea to teach what they learn down in the Arkansas school in Little Rock.

Bobby Roberts isn't sure they can teach that stuff, but I think they can and must. Sure, I know that you develop and hone those skills on the job. But you can and must introduce that wisdom to new librarians. If you don't, you condemn libraries to more decades of amateur politics, amateur public relations, and amateur public management.In their obsession with information technology, our schools have left a huge gap in the curriculum. They teach such skills as online searching and other aspects of computer use that will soon gravitate to elementary or high school curricula. Yet they have nearly abandoned public sector management. A few faculty teach that library management is the same as business management and adapt their material from the ubiquitous MBA programs.

Public administration is different. It requires wisdom in budgeting under extreme accountability without easy, bottom-line measures of success. It requires knowledge of public sector economics, taxation, and the diverse regional and local manifestations of both. It requires very special human resources talent. Public managers cannot hire and fire with the quick, simple protocols of business. The law of public sector employment is far more complex. It requires very special knowledge of labor/management relations and the complicated terms of their coexistence in a host of jurisdictions and places. It requires knowing how to work with the elected and appointed, how to serve both the public and the politicians in some win-win scenario. It requires a special kind of public relations that treats every person, regardless of any limitations he or she may have, as not only an equal but as a boss and owner of the place.

The good librarians in our society have had to learn these things on the front lines. Many have failed. You read about them in the local papers or in the professional magazines.

The knowledge of public library management has usually eluded the classroom, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there. We know it can be learned, because down there in Little Rock they have taught and learned it well, as they have in so many other libraries. In Little Rock, they even picked up a few pointers from Bill Clinton.

If our professional schools and graduate programs won't teach this knowledge we need so badly, maybe we should require every librarian to do a semester at the Arkansas school before we certify their MLS.