Save Professionalism

The public library must be respositioned as an educational institution!

By Bill Crowley -- Library Journal, 9/1/2005

The public library cannot compete in the information marketplace. It is not a business and cannot operate modeled after a business enterprise. For the public library to survive, and for public librarians to survive as professionals, public librarians must take the library back to its roots in education. The current model of the public library as an information aggregator and provider must be reconsidered.

The Internet and World Wide Web, plus newer competition from Google and other for-profit information agencies, mean the public library will be forced to find a new position in our society and culture. Because of these new enterprises, information, now viewed as a marketplace commodity, can be supplied much more conveniently for much lower costs. The public library simply cannot compete with the "information business" in the information marketplace dominated by Google and its ilk. It must rededicate itself to the educational purposes for which it was founded.

People's views of an institution or occupation are formed in childhood and adjusted as a result of further experience—what psychiatrists and psychologists call "mental models." The citizen's mental model of the public librarian does not always include the idea of a professionally educated leader. People are often surprised that librarians hold master's degrees from programs accredited by the American Library Association (ALA). They are unaware that librarians have educational requirements the equivalent of the business world's MBA or social work's MSW. They are likely to believe that the public library is operated by haphazardly selected people who are paid to read books or play with computers all day, when they aren't captivating children's imaginations through telling really great stories.

Public mental models of librarians often fail to recognize professionalism in public libraries. They are in stark contrast to community views of other local experts. People don't even discuss a "school" without the mental image of a well-educated teacher licensed to instruct students in one or more subjects. People wouldn't believe in an "operating room" without a trained surgeon. A "law office" is where you consult a professionally prepared attorney. It is even assumed that dental hygienists, barbers, and beauticians will possess credentials to practice their professions. The consequences are dire for our profession when the mental models of our local communities do not acknowledge the value of librarian professionalism in designing and providing public library services.

"If all that public library directors talk about is electronic information, why do we need master's degree librarians in public libraries?" a Chicago-area library trustee asked me. "We have some pretty good community colleges around Chicago. Community college graduates with associate's degrees in information technology probably know more about electronic information than master's degree librarians," he asserted. There is a glut of IT graduates, he explained to me, and they can be hired at half a librarian's salary. "They might even do a better job!" he concluded. The trustee's comments and questions are not surprising in a world where information is considered to be a commodity and Google and company provide "good enough" information fast, at low cost, to anyone with access to a computer.

For years, the professional rhetoric of public librarians to local communities is that the value of public libraries lies in their being an information center. The terms used often echo similar services in the corporate world. Many people now define public libraries by this business information model. But the model of the public library as corporate information clone comes with a heavy price.

For-profit organizations increasingly off-shore/outsource information services to other, lower-cost countries. Operating from the business model, information services provided by the public library cannot avoid that same attraction to outsourcing. It may not be possible to justify employing professionally educated librarians "onsite" in this information-as-commodity world with its demands for lower prices and greater convenience.

Although it has been occasionally discussed from the founding of the profession, the public library–as–business model became a more serious proposition in the mid- and late 20th century. During this period, a number of graduate library and information studies programs accredited by ALA changed their missions. Instead of educating librarians, they decided to train information professionals for an expanding economy. For the corporate sector, this was an eminently defensible and understandable move. Business embraces information specialists, knowledge managers, and competitive data analysts who focus on the corporate bottom line, while it generally ignores librarians who hold the view that "information should be free." The booming market for electronic data products, around for years now, produces an environment where ALA-accredited programs and their parent universities can make a lot of money researching and teaching the creation, collection, analysis, and dissemination of electronic information. While this was true before it arrived, the rise of the World Wide Web offered even greater opportunities for attracting new students, grants, and faculty positions.

Since much of a public library's budget is composed of personnel costs, planning for such business-style branding often combined effective marketing approaches with the cost-saving and deprofessionalizing steps to free up resources that were discussed in this author's "The Suicide of the Public Librarian" (LJ 4/15/03, p. 48ff.).

Recent conference presenters are telling librarians to really cut costs so that the public library can succeed as an information provider in a globalized environment. They see international commercial competitors creating track records for providing accurate information at a mere fraction of the domestic U.S. cost. Their money-saving approaches include hiring professional librarians only as managers, centralizing all collection development, and replacing reference librarians with library assistants to provide the necessary human presence at information desks.

The profession's uncritical embrace of Hennen's American Public Library Ratings (HAPLR), developed by Thomas J. Hennen Jr., has given strength to the effort to deprofessionalize the public library to achieve a lower-cost business model. Hennen's system of ranking public libraries on the state and national level—based entirely on quantitative measures—fits precisely into the business model. Unfortunately, HAPLR helped create local climates where administrators cut personnel costs by substituting lower-paid staff for librarians, thus improving their library's ranking. HAPLR will probably undermine the future of public librarians for at least a generation to come. It is much too late to force the ranking genie back into the e-data bottle.

Neither the profession nor the nation found it necessary to rate American public libraries for decades, even though a treasure of data collected by state library agencies and accumulated by the federal government sat underused, accessible electronically through the Federal-State Cooperative System for public library data. Despite this information gold mine, agencies and associations at the national or state level were unwilling to use it to rate and rank libraries. This stemmed from both ethical misgivings and political realities. The ethical resistance reflected the widespread understanding that numbers taken outside their local context could not give an adequate picture of public library quality. Those pre-Hennen decisions of government agencies and library associations not to rank public libraries also reflected political reality. If such arbitrary and easily challenged ratings of public libraries were promulgated by government agencies, the lowest-ranked libraries would undoubtedly complain—and rightly so—to their elected representatives.

Such statistical formulations ignore difficult-to-quantify factors such as the value of professional librarians or the age, condition, or user-friendliness of library collections and buildings.

There is a realistic alternative to the business model of the public library, and it does not lead to the diminution of public library professionalism. It offers more hope and is supported by some of the strongest values of American culture.

In the past, the first course taken in "library school," now the information school, described the public library as having educational, informational, and recreational roles. Following the end of World War II, the American public library profession began to assert that the library's informational function ought to be its primary role. The profession diminished the library's philosophical commitment to its educational and recreational responsibilities. A major symbol of this conceptual transformation was the postwar Public Library Inquiry,a massive study of America's public libraries, funded by the Carnegie Corporation. In the report's summary volume, The Public Library in the United States (Columbia Univ. Pr., 1950), the project staff emphasized that the highest priority should be placed upon the provision of information by public libraries. Only in a secondary way was the library to be committed to encouraging ongoing self-education for people of all ages.The inquiry dismissed the public library's recreational role, warning that it would doom the institution in the new communications age. By the final decades of the 20th century, information was king in the public library, lifelong education was tolerated, and the ever-popular recreational role of the library was a source of embarrassment.

It is clear that the informational role of the library must be rethought. The advent of the Internet and World Wide Web changed the role of the public library in the provision of information. The newer competition from Google and other for-profit information agencies for the job of locating information and delivering it to users hugely complicated the issue. A repositioning of the public library has been forced by the views that have come with these new information enterprises. Information, now seen as property, can be supplied for much lower costs through these new providers. For some time it has been apparent that the primary "information issue" for the public library is whether the institution and its professional librarians can really compete in the information arena dominated by Google and others. If not, what can public libraries and public librarians do to meet critical public needs and thereby safeguard their future?

Critical to the survival of professional librarianship is recognition that legislators, trustees, and librarians had it right when they deemed the public library to be fundamentally educational in nature. The trustees of the Boston Public Library in the famous 1852 City Document No. 37 (Upon the Objects To Be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library) declared the public library's primary role was to provide the opportunity for continued self-education for the people of Boston. It would build upon the educational work of institutions as diverse as the elementary school and the college and university. This obligation, like the community-financed role of public schools, is best carried out by professionals educated to do it. It is the antithesis of the business model of the public library.

The new public library agenda—a work in progress to encourage discussion of the value of professional librarians—is the beginning of an alternative to the role for the public library. It is also based on the premise that the public library's core mission is continuing education for all and on the primary understanding that the heavy tax support afforded U.S. public schools indicates the willingness of voters and citizens to support educational programs and agencies and the importance of education to our culture.

Librarians must recognize that the master's degree from a program accredited by ALA is the profession's educational "gold standard," our crucial credential, and it must be protected. Librarians must demonstrate that recognition by hiring staff who possess that degree. It might be the only viable method of stopping continued deprofessionalization brought on by the cost-cutting and other applications of corporate business models.

We must be aware that a unionized professional librarian work force represents a potentially valuable ally in resisting the imposition of the business model within public libraries by administrators willing to accept a lower standard of professional qualifications and performance in return for reduced cost. Through working to maintain the numbers of professionally educated librarians, such unions provide a countervailing force to the imperatives of deprofessionalization. Somewhat ironically, they help ensure that the future ranks of nonunion library administrators are filled with professionally educated librarians.

Librarians must accept that the need for leadership by national and state public library and trustee associations is critical to identifying the range of knowledge, understanding, and skill needed by professional librarians in the 21st century. They must ensure that present and future ALA-accredited programs offer courses and degrees that meet that professional standard.

Librarians must understand that the "recreational" activities of the public library, when analyzed, often support priority educational objectives. Examples include the advancement of children's reading and learning through entertaining preschool programs, the enhancement of teen writing skills through challenging poetry slams, and the maintenance of adult reading abilities through appealing book discussion groups.

Librarians must understand that a learning-centered model of the U.S. public library requires the presence of strong professional librarians in all children's programs, young adult activities, and adult readers' advisory services.

The educational model of the public library demands facilities designed or renovated to emphasize such learning forums as small and large public meeting rooms, computer labs, art galleries, and performance areas with portable stages that allow multiple uses of the same library space.

Librarians know that in an Internet-facilitated world, the public library's role in making effective information use possible is primarily educational. In that role librarians must provide instruction in using new information tools effectively and in deploying proven techniques for validating the information acquired. They must amass or identify valuable information resources and encourage their use in Internet-facilitated environments.

In the end, the long-term survival of the professional public librarian will be based on the adoption of a model in which effective public library programs are designed and delivered by librarians who share an educational focus and appropriate study in librarianship, as it was in the past. This is more than a strategy to combat the deprofessionalization engendered by the business model. It embodies the original purpose of public libraries, why they were created by citizens. In Illinois law, for example, the fundamental purpose for establishing public libraries is simply stated: "to provide local public institutions of general education for citizens" (ILCS 16/1-10). The "Land of Lincoln," home of the largely self-educated President who loved to read and saved the Union, got it right.