Lifecycle Librarianship

In a time when information self-service and enhanced competition have sent libraries of all types into an oftentimes desperate search for a renewed sense of purpose, a fundamentally important question takes center stage: How can libraries connect with the deepest aspirations of their service communities? Establishing such a connection will require looking beyond inadequate information models to adopt a renewed library approach to helping mayors and legislators, school boards and superintendents, and university presidents and higher education governing bodies solve critical problems faced by U.S. and Canadian national cultures. It will demand that trustees, librarians, Friends, and the other members of the library community escape the information illusion. They will need to take a leadership role in developing a new library philosophy called “lifecycle librarianship” to concentrate their efforts on helping patrons in their reading and lifelong learning effort, “from the lapsit to the nursing home.”

Such a vision of libraries, where the learning needs of every stage of life get addressed and support of reading is lifelong, will reinforce the foundations of the library. Public and institutional support is likely to follow, flowing toward an institution that helps solve recognized public problems by embracing its legislative and organizational responsibilities to address fundamental reading and literacy issues while enhancing lifelong learning opportunities.

U.S. and Canadian library communities face a deep-seated problem of our own making. Several decades ago, the closing of a number of new and long-established American Library Association (ALA)–accredited library schools traumatized administrators of many of the remaining programs, making them fear for their programs' continued existence. Looking inward, the professors and deans of these schools decided their programs were too small, too practitioner-oriented, too female, and too committed to the historic values and ideals of academic, public, and school librarianship. They decided they needed to offer courses that attracted more males, that led to more lucrative careers, and that represented values related to the market economy. Looking outward, these academics observed how information was becoming a valuable commodity as it escaped its former print home on library shelves for the digital world. In response, they embarked upon transforming the library-related courses that had historically formed the heart of their curricula. They prioritized classes dealing with the development, management, use, and sale of information. To provide the intellectual justification for this transformation, the faculty joined with information-inclined practitioners to insure that ALA supported a definition of library and information studies that almost totally overlooks “library” while justifying a program's concentration on “information.”

If one drops the phrase library and from the text, the definition that governs the accreditation of programs, contained in ALA's 1992 Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library & Information Studies, can be seen for what it really is—a particularly strong justification of information science.

The phrase “library and information studies” is understood to be concerned with recordable information and knowledge and the services and technologies to facilitate their management and use. Library and information studies encompasses information and knowledge creation, communication, identification, selection, acquisition, organization and description, storage and retrieval, preservation, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, synthesis, dissemination, and management.

In this definition, there is no mention of the philosophical basis for the library's encouragement of reading or lifelong learning. In the current world of information education, the foundational ideas and values of library schools are often seen as anachronistic, as are the concepts and skills that enabled past library professionals to take leading roles in sustaining reading, lifelong learning, and democratic values. Instead, the faculty and deans of ALA-accredited programs, all too many of whom have no experience working in libraries and lack degrees in the field, prioritize only one aspect of library service—the provision of information—and argue that the demands of their campuses and the globalized economy make it the only viable answer to the pressing question of program survival.

For a time, the “information turn” actually seemed to work. Programs thrived, and new jobs became available as graduates of ALA-accredited programs began serving as webmasters and competitive data analysts in corporate and research environments. Then, in the last decade or so, the information roof started to cave in. First came new or renewed sources of competition. Faculty across the university found that they didn't need ALA-accredited programs to educate students on how to participate in the electronic information economy; they could teach them themselves. As a result, both new and old information education competitors began offering or expanding information-related degrees, now increasingly termed business, medical, legal, or other forms of informatics (information + electronics). It is now debatable whose graduates should be hired for open information positions in the corporate world.

Simultaneously, corporations and even governments followed up their earlier offshoring of information technology or IT jobs by exporting the work of information analysis to India, the Philippines, and other nations with well-educated English-language speakers willing to work for a fraction of U.S. or Canadian salaries. To complicate matters, members of the general public, students, and even faculty began to use Google, Yahoo, and other search engines in preference to library-supplied databases. In the process, they learned they could develop their own strategies for securing relevant information, strategies that were good enough to complete the job at hand.

The information turn of the late 20th century, the perceived solution to the problem of keeping ALA-accredited educational programs alive, has become the critical practitioner problem. Two recent publications, OCLC's Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources [PLIR]: A Report to the OCLC Membership, and Public Agenda's Long Overdue: A Fresh Look at Public Attitudes About Libraries in the 21st Century well document the nature and the extent of this difficulty.

PLIR is one of the relatively few in-depth studies of library relevance on a global basis. Published in 2005, it used data collected by Harris Poll Online and involved 3,348 English speakers, male and female, 18 years and older, with Internet access and living in Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, the UK, and the United States. The results of this survey were studied by OCLC staff with strong business and marketing backgrounds. These researchers and writers concluded that, “When prompted, information consumers see libraries' role in the community as a place to learn, as a place to read, as a place to make information freely available, as a place to provide research support, as a place to provide free computer Internet access [emphasis in original] and more.”

Computer-literate people, according to the study, do not oppose getting information from their libraries; they simply prefer to acquire it elsewhere. When pressed on how to improve library services, they will suggest buying more books and mention the need for hospitable surroundings, friendly staff, plenty of parking, and convenient hours. In short, they wanted a positive physical, not online, library experience.

Public Agenda's Long Overdue, published in 2006 with support from the Americans for Libraries Council and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, deals primarily with public libraries. However, given OCLC's discovery of the international tendency of the computer literate to conflate all libraries into a single mental image, its findings undoubtedly reflect perceptions and conditions of support for the programs of academic and school libraries as well.

According to the researchers, the top priorities of the public include keeping library services free; having enough current books for children and adults; purchasing enough reference materials; making sure a friendly, knowledgeable librarian is available; providing reading hours and other programs for children; maintaining buildings well; arranging for information and books to be organized for easy self-service; being a safe place where teenagers can study and congregate; and operating evenings and weekends.

It is remarkable how well these expectations for library services correlate with what Public Agenda found to be the public's top priorities for community action—public education, early childhood learning programs, a safe place for teenagers, help for those lacking basic reading skills, reliable medical information, easily accessible government information, job-search help, dependable public transportation, convenient places for public events and meetings, public places where people can access information on the Internet, and orientation of new immigrants to the community and America.

Taken together, the OCLC and Public Agenda findings do not reveal respondents as “information consumers.” They show us lifelong learners and recreational readers who, as is now widely known, are often one and the same. OCLC in particular tried to measure information use but actually reported on people who tend to see library service as part of a learning process.

The findings prompted this author to offer a new definition of “library science or librarianship” as a preliminary step to developing a new definition of the field of library and information studies and, in the interim period, helping to guide the development and implementation of relevant library services. Which better describes what the academic, public, or school library actually does, the ALA-definition previously given or the following explanation?

As a field, library science or librarianship is concerned with understanding and advancing learning throughout the human life cycle, with a particular emphasis on the processes of reading and other forms of communicating story, information, and meaning through library and library-related contexts. The emphasis on human learning, content, and meaning distinguishes library science from the newer field of information science.

In order to sustain librarians and libraries, we must discard the “information illusion” and develop the library services necessary to help solve critical social problems by addressing reading and learning, including electronic learning. Public, academic, and school librarians should adopt the service philosophy of lifecycle librarianship and jointly plan at town, city, or county levels to identify and meet human learning needs from “lapsit to nursing home.” The development of library services appropriate for the entire human life cycle might include discussion on how to address the problems identified by the Public Agenda study and the resulting impact on library education. We'll need to determine, for example, the courses needed in ALA-accredited programs, such as “Libraries and Learning” or “Libraries and Reading,” to guarantee that new professionals are taught how to address the library-relevant needs of a service population that ranges in age from small children to the most senior of adults.

OCLC and Public Agenda found that libraries are valued primarily for their contributions to individual and societal lifelong learning and reading and, admittedly, for performing a durable if increasingly secondary information role. Useful technologies come and go, but the impulse to learn, including the desire to learn about technology, can span a person's entire life. Library patrons believe that the library “business” is learning and reading. It is the sort of business that can ensure that librarians have the opportunity to remain relevant for far longer than the foreseeable future.