Blatant Berry: Can ALA Bring Change?
Disappointed by Gorman's effort to reform library education
John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large -- Library Journal, 9/15/2006
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Michael Gorman's initiative as president of the American Library Association (ALA) may, like so many ALA presidential initiatives, have ended “not with a bang but a whimper,” to use a descriptor created by that other British-American T.S. Eliot. The program was an effort to jump-start some sort of reform in library education, and it is too bad more didn't come of it.
Whether or not library education faces a “crisis,” there is a crying need for change, and while some is going on, it is piecemeal and localized. Librarianship requires graduates from programs designed to respond to national trends in information, leisure, technology, and entertainment and the need for civic awareness and community. ALA's national leadership must help effect that change, and ALA accreditation ought to be a component.
At the outset of Gorman's program, practitioners and library educators flocked to sessions to share their views on what library education should do to remain relevant to the practice. They also talked about how librarianship could reclaim its turf from the invading computer geeks, informationists, and alien Ph.D. holders from other disciplines who have conquered faculty posts and deanships at many schools.
A traditionalist with whom I frequently agree, and just as frequently don't, Gorman alienated the newest constituency in our professional ranks early on. He attacked the young and not-so-young library bloggers in these very pages (“Revenge of the Blog People,” BackTalk, LJ 2/15/05, p. 44). That, coupled with Gorman's view that a more traditional approach to library education ought to balance the field's obsessions with new information technology, turned off a huge number of the young technolibrarians so prominent in librarianship now.
The Gorman initiative largely missed input from them and other students and recent graduates so vocal on the blogs, the discussion lists, and the other new channels of Library 2.0. These folks may not have been intentionally excluded, but they didn't show up. Perhaps they weren't invited, the venues at conferences were beyond their means, or the publicity about meetings on the initiative didn't reach them. Of course, it could have also been neglect or a conscious choice on their part. Whatever the case, after all that effort, we still don't know what current students and recent graduates really think about the educations upon which they spend so much money.
The results of the meetings were mixed. Predictably, there was a lot of defensive discussion from the LIS academics and a few others about whether or not there really was a crisis in library education. The consensus was, of course, that there might be a few problems but nothing so dire as a crisis. Maybe if the discussion had reached beyond the “Is it a crisis or not?” phase, we could have gotten to some potential positive action.
Then came the old litany of complaints from the established practitioners, mostly administrators, who told everyone over and over, as they have for decades, that the library school graduates simply are not prepared to do the jobs they take in libraries when they arrive there.
As far as we know, no alteration in curricula or the way the schools operate has come out of the Gorman initiative. Yet the demand for change seems obvious. The schools must add education in the operational practice of librarianship. Many of them have to modernize and make less elementary and pedestrian what passes for technology education in so many programs.
We know of no effort to rewrite the ALA accreditation standards, the current edition of which are not standards at all. If there is such a move afoot, there appears little from the Gorman initiative will enrich it.
This proves again that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make a one-year ALA presidency into a productive professional force. Maybe Leslie Burger can fix that.
