What's an MLIS Worth?, Part IV

Deans, Directors, and Chairs If you are a faculty member or a director and your school did not respond fully, now is the time to get started on the 2007 survey. There are three stages in the annual LJ Placements & Salaries Survey.

1. The school must provide the name and email address of the person who will serve as its contact and determine whether the school prefers to use the web or print version of the student survey. Do this online beginning in late winter 2008. Announcements will be forwarded to each school with the web address and other updated information.
2. Submit the Institutional Survey. The school's contact tells LJ the number and gender of graduates, the placement activity, and what areas were easier or harder to place for graduates during the year currently surveyed. This can be done after December graduation or late winter graduations.
3. Get the 2007 surveys to graduates. Direct graduates to the web survey or distribute and collect paper surveys and then mail in copies. Outreach efforts will be made through new librarian electronic lists to encourage graduates to contact their schools to participate.

For Graduates If you are a 2007 graduate, make sure that your institution has your current email and mailing addresses. Ask to be included in the 2007 LJ Placements & Salaries Survey. If your institution has chosen not to participate, you can still do so by contacting the author. Please answer all questions: the most frequently omitted information covers gender, salary, and type of institution/library.

For six months now, Deborah Lilton has served as bibliographer for English, film studies, and theater at the Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville. She earned her MLIS from the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, via a series of scholarships that paid her way. She represents the Class of 2006 from American Library Association (ALA)–accredited MLIS programs.

Ranked eighth in her graduating class at Central High School in Memphis, Lilton went on to earn her AB in English at Christian Brothers University there. She was on scholarship and majored in English for corporate communications, a combined business and writing degree. “I wanted to be a journalist,” says Lilton. “I thought that major would prepare me for that and for work in a business setting, editing newsletters, marketing communications, and the like.”

In 2003, Lilton earned her master's in English at Rutgers University, NJ, where she taught first-year composition and critical thinking as a part-time lecturer. Lilton loved teaching but couldn't live on the salary. A friend in the Rutgers program told Lilton about ALA's Spectrum Scholarship. Lilton was interested but didn't really want to go back to school. “My family said it was time to go to work,” she says, adding, “the job market was difficult, you couldn't get a job in Memphis then.”

Lilton heard Sybil Moses of the Library of Congress speak at a program and afterward asked her about librarianship. Moses gave Lilton her card. “I liked writing and teaching, but I didn't want to get a Ph.D. Later, I contacted Dr. Moses, and she remembered me. She gave me good information and has been a mentor ever since. I still talk to her often.”

To see if librarianship “was for me,” Lilton sought and got a job as a paraprofessional Library Assistant III in the library at the University of Memphis. As a student at Christian Brothers she had worked in circulation, periodicals, and inventory.

At the Memphis library, Lilton picked up a copy of Black Collegian. There was an article entitled “Librarianship: A Career of Diversity” by Carla Hayden, director of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library and then-president of ALA. “I didn't know anything about her until I read the article, or that she was president of ALA. Then I thought about what my friend had said...I approached her at a book event. Things began to fall into place. I applied for the Spectrum Scholarship after two months at the University of Memphis.”

As a student assistant in the library at Christian Brothers, Lilton didn't realize that “you could get a master's in the field and make it your profession.” Her supervisor at Memphis, head of reference Bessie Park, helped her with information and guidance. A fellow library worker told her about the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) fellowship program designed to recruit people to academic libraries who had advanced degrees in other fields. Moses helped Lilton overcome her trepidation, telling her, “Even if you don't get it, what harm will it do to try?” Lilton applied through the University of Alabama.

She was one of the first seven of ten IMLS Fellows at Alabama. The weekly colloquia enriched her experience. IMLS covered all tuition. The ALA Spectrum Scholarship and an ARL internship helped pay living expenses. ARL's Initiative To Recruit a Diverse Work Force gives a stipend but requires the winner to work in an academic library for a period of time. Lilton chose to work at Vanderbilt University. “It fulfils the ARL commitment, but I really want to be there,” she says with conviction.

Lilton loved the program at Alabama's SLIS. “It was enriching, but I was glad I worked in an academic library before I went,” she says. “It helped me understand what was going on.” In one SLIS practicum, Lilton served on a committee to plan a learning commons at Alabama's university library. She did the literature review on the subject for the initial research phase and was particularly impressed by the learning commons at the University of Georgia.

Another practicum gave Lilton experience in library instruction. “I think we have to provide library instruction because college involves intellectual engagement, critical thinking, and much deeper levels of analysis. Students don't come with those skills. They know how to regurgitate, but they don't know how to be critical or to summarize,” says Lilton. “Students are embarrassed to admit what they don't know,” she says. “When you are embarrassed to admit what you don't know, you try to cover it up, and you are often able to get by.”

Lilton is conscious of the help she has gotten from her current mentors, but she says, “I am also grateful to leaders that went before...people like E.J. Josey and Virginia Lacy Jones....” She feels very lucky, too, to have been at the Second Annual Leadership Symposium held by the ARL Office of Diversity, where she learned about trends that are changing research library practice.

“The skill set in libraries is certainly becoming more diverse,” says Lilton, when asked about diversity and the future of libraries. “Libraries will change dramatically.... The library today is like those transformer toys of the 1980s: there are many more versions of them than meet the eye—and more to come, too.” —John N. Berry III