Gorman, Panel Express Concerns for LIS Education

-- Library Journal, 11/22/2004

At a panel titled "The Future of Library Information Education" on November 5, American Library Association (ALA) president-elect Michael Gorman, who has taken LIS education as the theme of his ALA presidency, reviewed the state of LIS programs in the U.S. and Canada. The meeting was sponsored by the Metropolitan New York Chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology and held at the Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Gorman, who serves as dean of libraries at California State University, Fresno, expressed a range of strong concerns, observing that LIS schools and the profession at large have been unable to state their core values or specify core competencies for practice.

Although professions are usually defined by their ability to control education for their practice, librarianship, Gorman asserted, is perilously close to losing that control. Among the key problems he cited were confusion over the difference between education and training and lack of consensus on the nature of library science. Specifically, Gorman criticized ALA program accreditation for simply measuring a program against its own mission and vision statements, adding that, due to an increased concentration on technology, curricula in LIS programs today are not adequately addressing the real needs of the profession. "We need a new model," he said, alluding to "a crisis in library education, not a crisis in LIS education."

Gorman ended with a plea that accreditation be tied to national standards and that the programs develop greater concentration on librarianship by cooperating with practitioners in developing curricula. Nick Belkin, chair of the Rutgers University LIS program, said he was heartened by Gorman's critique. According to Belkin, who described the Rutgers LIS program in some detail, LIS education should be "a partnership" between the programs and the practice. "A profession requires continuing education," he concluded. Other educators on the eight-member panel echoed that theme. Syracuse University's Barbara Kwasnik said that her program has created a "professor of practice" on its faculty, to develop the kind of cooperation with and connection to libraries that Gorman urged. However, the discussion ran out of time before any of the educators specifically addressed Gorman's indictment of ALA accreditation standards, or his call for national normative standards.