We Must Unify Practice and Research
A natural partnership: LIS programs and campus libraries
John N. Berry III, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 5/1/2003
As a laboratory, a place to gain experience through internships/student assistantships, and an example for study and experimentation, the library is ideal. It could provide the connection to the practice that graduate LIS programs so often lack. Indeed, library staff might even teach in the LIS program. In return, the research and experimentation included in the LIS program could provide insights and information to improve library service and help reposition the library for the future.
This conundrum came up again while I was working on "LIS Recruiting: Does It Make the Grade? " (p. 38). In exploring how students decide to become librarians and how aggressively the LIS programs recruit, another great mystery surfaced: Why don't LIS programs partner with nearby libraries?
The reason those library school/library partnerships are so rare must stem from the sad history of the relationship between the LIS programs and the practicing profession. That history began when library education moved from the libraries and into the colleges and universities back in Dewey's day. Some say the break was caused by Dewey's insistence that the "library course" be based solely on the practice and focused on the best way to run a library. LIS education long ago graduated from that strategy, becoming increasingly research-based in order to be respected on campus. Ultimately, LIS programs claimed to be part of a discipline once called "library science," then "information science," and now the more encompassing and academically sexy, if pedestrian, "information studies."
Most practitioners view all of this as a retreat from libraries. Yet those librarians also see that most of the new recruits to LIS programs come from our buildings and want to work in them. Those libraries still hire most of the graduates. So the typical librarian—beset with budget cuts and staff shortages—sees the apparent flight of the LIS programs from the institution of the library and feels betrayed.
Librarianship's greatest strengths are equally practical and theoretical. Indeed, if we are ever going to create the information environment, apparatus, and agencies of the future, all the research, practice, policy, and politics of information must become part of our action plan. Practice ignorant of current information research is as sterile and dysfunctional as information research that disregards users. The combination of theory and practice will define and build our future.
The eternal tension between the library and information constituents of our field, the never-ending war between theory and practice has only retarded our progress and demeaned our status in both the professional and academic worlds.
Although the student body of our LIS programs is dominated by working librarians, the libraries on those campuses remain alien territory to both student and faculty from those courses. The urgent need for that alliance of professional practice and research scholarship should begin there.
