We Must Have Library Education

by John Berry III -- Library Journal, 2/15/1998

What began as "taxonomic tinkering" has become a hostile crusade

It was a trial balloon at first, a kind of taxonomic tinkering to disassociate library education programs from the institution and word library. At the annual meeting of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), that balloon became an aggressive and decidedly hostile assault on the connection between the schools and the library institutions that are and have been the primary job market for their graduates for so long.

ALISE events made the agenda clear. A program sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation featured reports on curriculum revision in the programs at three universities (Illinois, Pitt, and a new program at Denver). Kellogg has systematically financed programs like those at the University of Michigan, University of California-Berkeley, Drexel, Indiana University, and UCLA, which have been willing to end their library connections. Even Leigh Estabrook (Illinois), who tries to find a middle ground, still carried the message: "We are taking library and information studies out of the institution...." Pitt's Edie Rasmussen described a new curriculum in which four core courses numbered LIS2001-2004 feature the word information preceded by modifiers like "Understanding," "Organizing," "Retrieving," or "Managing Change in." Lynn Connaway of the new program at the University of Denver offered a breath of fresh air, i.e., librarians had input into that program's plans, but Connaway, too, promised "deemphasis of the library as the primary workplace."

The ALISE business meeting made it apparent that eliminating the "library" as institution and concept is the main preoccupation of too many LIS educators. The ALISE board voted five to one to completely remove the word library from the ALISE mission statement. The members postponed the action to await research, but they will be asked to sever the ALISE library ties next year.

The American Library Association (ALA), through its Committee on Accreditation (COA), accredits all the programs. The job was taken over by library educators decades ago. The current version of ALA's Standards for Accreditation was part of the beginning effort to cut the programs' ties to libraries. These standards are vague and unfocused. They require no attention to the library institution by any program. No program has been rejected under the new standards.

When you argue with library educators about their escape from libraries, the stock response is: "Librarianship is a subdiscipline (there are easily a dozen terms used here) of Information Studies." Every library educator whose support of changing the ALISE mission I challenged answered with words like those.

Since ALA's COA accredits these programs, it is obvious that its COA must address this fundamental break with the tradition that has educated and thus accredited nearly every librarian who currently practices. If the education of librarians is no longer to focus on libraries as the place where the work is done, by what logic does the American Library Association accredit the programs?

American librarians must demand that COA address this question immediately. Regardless of the rhetoric pouring forth from academe, the libraries of America need people educated in the administration, politics, society, and service philosophy of libraries. We need people indoctrinated in the proud principles of free access to free information, information as a public good, and the crucial importance of an agency devoted to the mission of serving the entire society. It was clear at ALISE that the new curricula will not do that job well.

It is, of course, just as logical, just as reasonable, for the education of school library professionals to reside in schools of education, that of public librarians in schools of public administration, and that of special librarians in schools of business, law, or medicine. We owe no allegiance to this upstart, academically challenged discipline of "information." The education of librarians requires professional schools of our own or of the fields we serve.