Protect Professionalism

Don't run them through weekend seminars and say they are librarians

John N. Berry III, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 11/1/2003

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They all declare their support of the embattled MLIS, the profession's entry-level degree, but some of the nation's top research library directors are experimenting with ways to recruit and "train" new experts to work in their libraries. Deans of the programs in library and information studies (LIS) would prefer that they use the term educate. That little difference points to a much bigger argument: Do specialists with expertise from other disciplines need the MLIS? Can those who have the MLIS do it all?

The question is whether or not the MLIS represents truly advanced professional study or simply gives LIS programs a monopoly on the key that opens the gate to jobs and careers as librarians. Is the degree about training and education, or is it just a "union card" to get into a closed shop? Some doubt that the MLIS really certifies one as a competent professional. Some only trust the degree to provide little more than an indoctrination and orientation to library values, customs, and jargon.

I disagree. Earning the MLS at Simmons so many decades ago was deeply educational, even transformative. Studying for the MLS changed my professional outlook, even my ideology. After decades working in the profession, I trust the MLIS more than ever. I oppose any effort to dilute the program, even though I favor efforts to modernize it and bring new skills, knowledge, and expertise into it.

These new initiatives include calls for one-summer sessions for a different credential, shortened "Executive Master's" programs fashioned on business school models, and awarding of credit toward the MLIS for education, research skills, and even long experience in library work. One of the most popular proposals will bring holders of the Ph.D. in a humanities discipline into a fellowship in a research library to recruit scholars to librarianship. You can read more about it in "Don't Call 'em Librarians ," beginning on page 34.

All of this has also produced legitimate fears for the integrity of the MLIS and library professionalism. Robert Martin, director of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, was very clear on the issue. "Programs that make an end run around the MLIS do not serve the profession or the library users," he warned. To meet research library needs, Martin said the field can employ well-qualified people to do "specialist kinds of work that is not librarians' work." He was against recruiting people with a Ph.D. if libraries "run them through a couple of weekend seminars and then say they are librarians."

Yale's Alice Prochaska, who decorates our cover, would encourage good people to come into the profession, but she is quick to say we "must ensure that they have proper professional background and that their credential is recognized in the university." Carla Stoffle at the University of Arizona agrees: "They must have deep understanding of the historical and current values and culture of the profession." Columbia's Jim Neal issued this challenge to his colleagues: "Libraries that hire individuals with other than MLS credentials should make a commitment to strongly encourage those individuals to get a library degree."

These ventures will mean new faces in our libraries and new ways to earn the title "librarian." It is not as if it doesn't happen already, even in the LIS deanery and other top positions.

Now the LIS programs will be forced to create new, shorter routes to the MLIS. If that means we have to compromise, it must be done with rigorous care to ensure that the skills, knowledge, and values of our profession will not be diluted or lost.

jberry@reedbusiness.com