A Nonlibrarian Takes the Carnegie

By John Berry III -- Library Journal, 1/1/1999

"What are we doing wrong?"

It's not the end of librarianship, but it is certainly a major setback: one more of America's great libraries will now be directed by a nonlibrarian. The pain goes a bit deeper, and the concern is a bit greater because this time that which is taken out of "professional" hands is the great Carnegie Free Library of Pittsburgh: the mother of all Carnegie libraries, the symbol of symbols in our field, the original.

Why is it that trustees and search committees look outside our field and beyond our credential to find leaders for so many of our great libraries?

To keep it all in context, it is important to remember that the Carnegie appointment is unique. It is quite possible, indeed likely, that no librarian with the experience and skills sought was unearthed in the search conducted by headhunters Korn/Ferry International and the Carnegie search committee. I spoke with members of the committee who hinted that the candidate pool was inadequate to their criteria. I also spoke with several librarians who were asked to apply for the job. Every one of them told me they had declined the invitation.

Pittsburgh is a small city with a declining population. The library is not well supported by the city. Its governance, as one of three parts of the Carnegie Institution, is complex, even bizarre. The board has three kinds of members, the largest group of which is self-perpetuating. The whole is presided over by President Ellsworth Brown, making the library director a kind of second-in-command. This is not an attractive post for someone who has already run a large public library. Brown and the Carnegie may have done the best they could by appointing Herb Elish, a manager and steel executive with a fine reputation for running huge agencies in both the public and private sectors. Elish also brings solid political connections in Pittsburgh.

Those facts may explain Pittsburgh's decision. They don't explain why others feel no compulsion to hire a director who carries credentials in our profession. What are we doing wrong?

There are two problems. First, we seem to expect that our entry-level credential, the MLS, can retain and carry its importance all the way to our top jobs. That would be a good trick for a credential earned in one short year of graduate study. The education required to earn that credential is seriously lacking in areas crucial to guiding a public library -- the economics and the politics of public sector management.

Susan Fuller, LJ's 1998 Librarian of the Year discussed these gaps: "The profession really ought to do something systematic about political savvy, about learning to listen, about staying out of other people's agendas.... We must do something more thoughtful to help citizens learn what the public library is, what it means."

All librarians, their state associations, and certainly the American Library Association (ALA) must raise the level of citizen education and public relations to gain the professional respect given so many others. To that end, it is essential that we mount efforts now to show citizens what a library is, how it works, and why it is crucial to our society. The advocacy efforts in and out of ALA have been a good start, but they haven't convinced enough people to put a librarian in charge of the Library of Congress, the libraries of Harvard, or the Carnegie in Pittsburgh.

ALA will hold a Congress on Professional Education April 30-May 1 this year to address needed reforms in library education and that credential. Obviously, the lack of status and stature given to our professional degree must be of concern to those participating in the congress. The top public, academic, and federal library jobs in the United States do not require a library credential. Librarians are not sought to fill those posts. These are, at least in part, problems of library education, and they must be added as top priorities to the agenda of the congress.

We must educate both new librarians and citizens to the economic and political place of the library as a public sector agency in our society.