Conference Keynote: Michael Gorman

Michael Gorman, ALA President and Dean of Library Services at Cal State, Fresno, delivered an intriguing keynote entitled, "New Directions in Library Education." It's a little weird to be blogging about Gorman because of the fuss last year about the "blog people": http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA502009.html -- but what the heck.

Some random, out of context, stuff from Gorman's talk:

"The only group older than librarians is Elvis fans."

As librarians, we're an aging group and we need enthusiastic and educated librarians to take our places -- but many retirees are not being replaced.

There are 117,000 libraries of all kinds in the US, most of which are school "libraries" (defined variously).

We have to believe that all these libraries need oversight (at least) by trained librarians. It's part of the library faith.

There are 50-ish accredited LIS programs in US and 7 in Canada; many more accrediting agencies for school librarians.

If you think of Canada as a "cold horizontal California," you'd think that California should have 7 or 8 LIS programs instead of 2 (the same number as Denton, TX).

California schools are in very expensive areas -- not where they could do the best for our profession.

Practitioners often have unrealistic expectations of LIS programs -- the difference between education and training. We expect too much of recent LIS graduates: LIS education should bring you to the place where training can get you going on the job...

Librarianship: "professional aspects of work in libraries."

Somebody who gives you a bandaid is not a doctor -- we have to draw a line.

Melvil Dewey taught "library hand" in library school, but we've come a ways since then...

Employers seem unhappy with new graduates -- we can no longer count on LIS graduates having experience with cataloging -- the degree no longer presumes a core of standard courses.

Gorman examined LIS course catalogs and found a trend toward adjuncts teaching the "library" courses -- which might be good: practitioners often have excellent and useful experience, but they're not full-time LIS faculty doing research and advising PhD students.

ALA has standards for LIS school education (http://www.ala.org/ala/accreditation/accreditation.htm) but the actual practice in terms of accreditation seems to be something else. We tend to use a "descriptive approach" that takes what's currently being done as the standard. This is opposed to the American Medical Association which uses a "prescriptive approach" with set agreed-upon standards that have to be met for accreditation.

Gorman's contention is that there should be a set of core courses/competencies that ALA-accredited LIS programs should teach. Things like:

- collection development
- cataloging
- reference and library instruction
- systems and technology
- library administration: the "facts of library life"
- other kinds of libraries -- when other libraries suffer, we all suffer

He described a Norwegian LIS initiative that identified 4 areas that needed to be covered (see: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla71/papers/061e-Audunson.pdf).

During the Q&A, Michele Besant made the point that the important thing is to keep the lines of communication open. LIS educators may be trying to do one set of things while practitioners/employers need/want something else. We should be talking about whether a core curriculum of library courses, taught by full-time faculty, is desirable or even possible. And then we can talk about what that curriculum looks like.

It's a tough question and one that we should keep thinking about.