Blatant Berry: Start a Corps, Not a Corpse
Don't saddle poor libraries with obsolete boomers
By John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large -- Library Journal, 5/1/2006
The argument started the day a press release announced the American Library Association's (ALA) RFP (request for proposals) for a $15,000 “feasibility study” to consider a Library Corps “to recruit retired librarians to provide assistance to libraries that need help.” The battle quickly spread across the ALA discussion lists. It pitted the growing host of young graduates from ALA-accredited LIS programs against the baby boomers who have clogged the library job market by holding on to jobs long after retirement age.
The young folk complain, with good reason, that ALA and the LIS programs falsely recruited them with promises of careers, relatively good compensation, and growth, owing to the imminent retirement of a huge number of veteran librarians. So far, the old folks have held on to those jobs, the attrition has been very slow. Now, moan the young professionals, ALA proposes to make the problem worse by offering the few baby boomers who have retired an opportunity to volunteer in libraries “that need help.” (Is there a library that doesn't need help?)
ALA enlisted Leslie Burger, the organization's president-elect and director of the Public Library in Princeton, NJ (one of the few in New Jersey that doesn't need help) to support the Library Corps idea. “The feasibility study will explore ways that retirees can share their experience with libraries that need assistance,” says Burger in the ALA press release.
Burger told me, however, that her original idea was a Library Corps modeled after the Peace Corps. It would be open to any and all librarians, especially those jobless recent LIS grads, a far better idea than a volunteer club for retirees. Open as well to the young, a Library Corps would help solve two or three problems with one initiative.
It is far better, for example, to support a young graduate to be director or take a librarian position in one of the many small libraries in communities that, we are regularly told, can't afford directors or staff who have the MLS. The new librarians would get experience and a job. The impoverished small library would get a subsidized, MLS-holding professional rather than be saddled with a burnt-out retiree with obsolete ideas of what a modern library should be.
We don't want volunteers to take these positions and further exacerbate the job shortage. The small library must be required to pay for a portion of the compensation for the young MLS librarian. The rest, up to the level of a living wage, would be paid for by the profession, through grants, other fundraising in and from ALA, or elsewhere. The Library Corps would find candidates for these positions and contribute to their pay.
I mean no disparagement of old fogies, although I believe there would be fewer libraries that “need assistance” if the boomer librarians had been better at what they do. Look, I am older than most of them. I retired a few months ago and have enjoyed watching young, energetic librarians and journalists more than fill the vacancy. I often have said, “We tried that years ago; it didn't work” to their ideas. Surprise! They work, with new blood, a new society, and new technology to drive them.
ALA should use the Library Corps idea the way Burger first proposed it. It must be a corps for all librarians who have the time and inclination to help libraries. It must not be a final resting place for us old folks and our obsolete ideas. We retirees should volunteer to work on raising the funds to augment the salaries of those young people as we place them in the empty spots in small libraries. We'll work, in other words, to put that young blood we recruited to work in the field where it can bring new energy.
Of course, we retirees will always be at the ready with free advice (worth every penny). Hell, we'll even take paid consulting jobs if the young really run into trouble. Let's create a Library Corps, not a library corpse.
