It is time to begin a new discussion on life-long learning. Ray Metz will serve as our guest editor. Ray is currently the interim director of the University Library at Case Western Reserve University. He has always been interested in and supportive of continuing education and life-long learning. He is interested in this issue for librarians, but also for other information professionals as evidenced by his being a member of the Professional Development Committee of CAUSE.
Please welcome Ray Metz as our guest editor and let the discussion on "life-long learning" begin.
Now that I've probably made some sweeping generalizations...
Many people are talking about developing learning organizations -- where learning is a basic part of life on the job. Are libraries such places? Do library schools play a role in this? How do we turn all this talk into action -- with a real result for our users?
Continuing education is much more than asking for time away from work to attend a workshop. It can be the professional reading we do, the electronic discussion groups we monitor, or even the insights we gain from exploring a beautiful piece or art or music. In fact, I'm convinced that I have always learned more from exploring other fields and applying them to the library setting.
The next couple of weeks give us the opportunity to explore these ideas (or any other threads you'd like to on the issue).
Note: I see continuing education, retraining, professional development, retooling, and life-long learning as all related, hence I use them sprinkled throughout. I encourage you to NOT just think of life-long learning as well.
But, the suggestion that library faculty should have to go and work in a library for five years to get in touch with the profession reveals a lack of understanding of the pressures on LIS professors to conduct research, scholarship, teaching, as well as professional and service activities. Working for five years in a library, as a requirement for faculty (I presume during their normal work periods) -- does this mean full time or part time? Would this be recognized as scientific and scholarly, and not be detrimental to promotion or tenure decisions. The pressure on LIS faculty to conduct scholarly research (equal in quality to other scholars in the social and physical sciences) and obtain grants is intensifying -- how can this be done if we also had to spend time working in libraries?
Faculty do conduct educational and research activities with librarians exploring important issues to the profession. But we need to recognize that there's a difference between being a practitioner/manager of library/information centers and being a scholar or scientist or researcher. Universities now require LIS professors to be scholars, researchers and teachers -- not efficient practitioners.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering and its School of Library and Information Science both have large programs in Continuing Education and Professional Development that are successful. It should suggest something else.
Are we not talking the internal culture of the organization and its collective reaction to someone who does something out of the group norm? If the group norm is to shun further education and to put down the person who violates that norm then that person is not going to be able to contribute anything. Acceptance of life-long learning starts with a group accepting the idea that it is desirable. The individual can be responsible for it but the library has to set out a climate that encourages its staff to take that responsibility and to use that additional training/learning in the work setting once it is obtained.
Several of the (intentionally?) provocative comments starting this revolve around the concept that, apparently self-evidently, faculty in library and information science are by definition out of touch. Ignoring the issues raised by this set of assumptions, what does this mean for continuing education?
-- This, by the way, is not very far from the Institute for Automotive Service Excellence approach. Obviously, there is a corollary:
How's about this for continuing the provocation?
>The next couple of weeks give us the opportunity to explore these ideas (or any other threads you'd like to on the issue).
. . . >4. What can we do to retrain (or redirect) our professionals in ""technical services" to be of more value to those we serve? (This was originally phrased "How do we encourage the dismantling of technical services?" Did I say it more politically correct?)
This is indeed a strange question! It implies that professionals in "technical services" are not doing something of value! I beg to differ. They provide a tremendous service in organizing information so that others can have some hope of finding what they seek. What's more, there is a great future for this kind of service.
Those who have been reading the literature know that there is an immense amount of work to be done in the area once called "technical services." The potential for continuing education there is great. An article by Mary Micco (not even an LIS professor, but a computer science professor!) just published says: "It is time to rethink our approach to authority control and, in fact, our whole approach to subject access. We can capture and should make sure that every document carries with it certain key descriptors -- a class[ification] number, a type, and the intended audience -- as well as the who, what, why, and where of contents. This will expedite document filtering, which is badly needed to manage the volume of information online."
Such work is not going to happen by itself. It will need to be done by "technical services" librarians -- those who have the understanding and expertise to organize. There are so few of these people left that they are not going to have any time left to learn "to be of more value to those we serve" (as if the organizing of the information isn't one of the greatest services that can be provided to those we serve!)
And for those libraries that think they will just let someone else do it (i.e., "outsource"), I say, "Shame on you for just TAKING and doing no GIVING in return." I just came from an Institute in New York where I heard Library of Congress cataloging policy staff members lamenting the difficult choices they are having to make because they do not have the human resources to do everything that is crying out to be done. How can a national cooperative organizing effort work, unless every library helps out?
WHAT SHOULD LIBRARY SCHOOLS BEING DOING TO HELP US WITH CONTINUING EDUCATION? I'd love to hear what people on here think of this? Are library schools doing everything we think they should in this area?
Arlene Taylor's comments are great! I couldn't agree more about the value that "technical services" librarians can provide in organizing information; HOWEVER, my experience and impression of others' experience is that the reality doesn't match what we'd like it to be. My gut says that 90-95% of technical services jobs are pretty much what they have been. So, how can library schools and libraries help? I know there will be isolated instances of change, but what you describe is a larger transition... I do NOT think "technical services" (does that term still fit?) should go away, rather each job needs to be rethought in light of the changes happening in our methods of library service.
Concerning Ms. Spinks' comments about Library School faculty working in libraries... I was hoping to stir up some conversation based on the truth in my comments. I do see value in the suggestion, although I don't know how we would ever accomplish the idea. It would be valuable for LIS faculty to work in a library on occasion -- just as I think it would be good to have almost any librarian experience front line activities...
Gary's comments remind me of the down side of Continuing Education, because we can always have people who misuse or misunderstand... But we have a responsibility to address these situations as they come up. Go for it, Gary.
Margaret: I am fortunate to have worked with librarians who are eager to learn more. In fact, my exposure to continuing education with our colleagues in the computing professionals dealing with information says that librarians are way more willing and interested in continuing education. However, that is not to say that they are not interested in learning. They just have a different professional culture about it.
James: Hmmm... The questions and statements were not set up to be provocative, but were aimed at stretching our thinking.
>An article by >Mary Micco (not even an LIS professor, but a Computer Science professor!) just published says: "It is time to rethink our approach to authority control and, in fact, our whole approach to subject access. We can capture and should make sure that every document carries with it certain key descriptors--a class[ification] number, a type, and the intended audience--as well as the who, what, why, and where of contents. This will expedite document filtering, which is badly needed to manage the volume of information online."
Once upon a time, when catalogue cards were hand-written, there was a practice called "annotation," which did all of the things that Mary Micco asks for. There was even at least one text-book that taught how to write annotations and I'm sure that if you look at early editions of cataloguing texts you'll find that they all gave some attention to the practice.
Of course, it disappeared -- time pressures, decreasing cataloguing staff numbers, and -- the computer, which, in the early days was not very good at handling variable length fields. Fascinating that a computer professor is now calling, in effect, for a return to the 1920s!
This is an issue I've spoken about on a number of occasions -- teasing my information retrieval colleagues with the comment that their systems do nothing to help the user in relation to those matters the user is most concerned about: how authoritative is the work, how complete is it in its treatment of the subject, what level of prior knowledge it assumes, and so on.
I'm not sure that this comment has much to do with life-long learning, but it's interesting none-the-less.
Continuing Professional Education
Many professions offer professional certification and require evidence of continuing education (CE) to maintain certification. My impression is that the MLS degree is a sort of certification, but apparently there are no CE requirements in your profession.
We have CE offered in free-standing seminars and in conjunction with professional conferences. Our professional societies approve the courses and require evidence of annual participation. Conference attendance also carries CE credits. Admittedly, CE alone is not life-long learning (...You can lead a horse to water, etc.). Nonetheless, most of my colleagues and I find the courses very stimulating. Also, a lot of networking -- a contributor to learning -- happens while attending CE. I commend the concept for your consideration.
Should Faculty Practice?
Should faculty need to take time off to practice what they teach? Always a discussion that makes the juices flow. But the root concern is whether faculty understand and teach to the needs of their customers, future librarians in your case. If a school produces good librarians, the only discussion of "how they do it" will be from those who want to copy the success.
Unfortunately, short-term survival requires schools to reward the ability to attract money and professional notice even though long-term success and reputation depend on the quality of students, scholarship and teaching.
There are several ways to remedy the dilemma, none entirely successful:
With regard to LIS schools and continuing education, I think there is no question that schools must bear some responsibility for this function, and many do it well. At SLIS we ask employers and alumni each year for their wish lists for continuing ed., including the Support Staff Institute we have held annually for eight years. Then we devise programs that address their needs. There must be a commitment to this process in the schools. The professional organizations also provide much of this.
I have noticed that employers are less than enthusiastic about sending employees to continuing ed. offerings. Typically libraries have to pay for it and employees may have to leave work to attend. The result is that few get to go and most never have any continuing education. We need a cooperative agreement with employers to do this systematically. I know of one public library system that was about to commit to such a plan with a library school that would conduct cumulative workshops for all staff, but it never came to pass because the employer backed out.
Amanda Spink's comments about the suggestion to require LIS faculty to do fieldwork as practicing librarians, etc. are noteworthy. Many faculty have such experience, many do field research with librarians, and some do spend time on the front line within sabbaticals or through invitations to do so from particular libraries. To require this however would be deleterious to faculty because they are required to teach and conduct research, in addition to service. It would interfere with and delay the tenure process for untenured faculty. It wouldn't be useful for faculty who pursue research areas that are not specifically library-oriented, but which are nevertheless important to the field. Still, there is no substitute for the enlightenment that occurs when working on the front line, and that can inform research.
More generally, I have concluded that lifelong learning is a process every citizen is more or less required to participate in, whether willingly or not, simply because society requires that we all know so much just to survive. We are held responsible for knowing legal, financial, medical, and social information. I believe that Sherry Turkel said that "learning is the new form of work."
Furthermore, since there is really too much to learn about anything, we all will remain lifelong novices in most domains. We need to address these deeper, internal, human issues with students who will be responsible for the tansformation of services into a "learning service center" (Penland).
Many professions offer professional certification and require evidence of continuing education (CE) to maintain certification. My impression is that the MLS degree is a sort of certification, but apparently there are no CE requirements in your profession.
This note is a reminder that the Medical Library Association provides a career recognition program in its Academy of Health Information Professionals. A five-year renewal of credentials is required. CE and other types of education as well as professional service (writing, editing, association work, teaching, etc.) are all recognized by the association for 'certification.'
At the last ALA meeting there was discussion within the ACRL about establishing a certification program for academic librarians. I don't think this program will happen, but life-long learning of information professionals was thoroughly discussed.
Most of us know that MARC records should be better and more complete than they are, but no one seems to take it on -- certainly not since my SAP project and its aftermath of interest. Format integration has been the buzzword along with URLS, URN, etc., but that is not what Mary has in mind.
I agree this has little to do with life-long learning, but it does need to be aired with admissions by all that we have been derelict since the depression in enhancing our catalog entries.
Lucky for the field, someone like Ed Wall at Pierian Press is planning how to link bibliographies and MARC records so that some value-added will demonstrate how bibliographic records of various sorts are linkable.
The model of higher education where we set up institutions which are established as separate independent bodies divorced from the corporate life of the country, which take, in the main, a cohort of young people and 'provide an education' was always an inappropriate model and is even more of an anachronism today.
Why don't we have a model where the work being done by bodies of higher education are this 'life-long learning' and we do not need to distinguish between the work done in degree courses and in continuing learning. It is time we got rid of this nonsense of depriving our young people of doing meaningful activities and allowed them to participate in the wider community and still continue to 'learn.' Most professions, students, and organizations would be better served by a system in which we had 'just on time' appropriate education.
If this was done then many of the previous discussions on what to put in the curriculum etc. become 'obvious.'
I would suggest that those higher education bodies that are already moving in this direction will be the survivors in the 20th century. Those that see a differences between undergraduate, graduate and 'life-long education' will wither.
Besides her specialization in technical services, Prof. Micco has written in other areas of Library Science too. One of her recent publications is: Expert systems for reference and information retrieval (with Ralph Alberico).
If we have been waiting for "them" to do it, whoever "they" are, for the most part we have waited in vain. It stuns me that twice a year tens of thousands of our professionals get together and do NOT do any professional, certifying training, and that training by other organizations is typically too little, too late. But that is just how things are, and they will not change unless library education changes. If our professional organizations, state agencies and individual library systems cannot or will not fill the gap, library schools must do so.
First, we need to crush the idea that librarianship is something you can learn in a one-year program. The message now is, get your MLIS and you're set for life. As the medical librarians know, that's not adequate. Information services are one of the most mutable professions.
Finally, our profession is highly feminized (though the automation areas are not -- a topic worth exploring on its own on this list, if it hasn't been). Feminized professions carry the stigma, "It's just women's work -- how hard can it be?" This means library schools, in order to produce professionals of the highest quality, must also be in the business of RE-valuing librarianship to produce a corps of librarians with strong self-images. That includes treating the status of librarianship as a reward, not a right -- a reward to be granted conditionally. It would be up to the librarian to put in the "sweat equity" to be prepared at different points in her career for reevaluation. The profession, in turn, would reward her with continued and enhanced status in the profession. It would be a symbiotic relationship.
I think there is also an idea that the only purpose of CE is to train professionals in expert knowledge. CE has many other values, though, not the least of which is to formalize our profession's jurisdictional claims (to paraphrase Andrew Abbott). Just as a patron will call the public library to ask when a doctor was last certified, or as a soldier's pistol-training card will be checked prior to issuing this person a gun, CE for librarians, done properly (and visibly), states to the practitioner and to society that there is an expert body of abstract knowledge which is so special and important that practitioners must be inspected periodically to ensure they know it and are capable of transmitting its knowledge. We need to scratch our feet in the turf a little more to indicate we mean business.
The threats come much more from technical advance and our professional recalcitrance to change than from decreased funding. Our profession should be very much engaged in the transition to the new library model. But do we see much real movement toward a set of clearly defined goals that translate into benefits for our users? Change of all kinds is already taking place, but the library world seems to react only passively or not at all.
Here are a few examples of our failures. Our cataloguing code is still based on procedures needed by libraries with card catalogues. For those libraries one goal is to minimize the number of cards, which of course means restricting access points and subjects, among other things. This has major implications of usability. Why after decades of automation progress do we not have a code designed for automated libraries? Automated systems are prevalent; disk space is inexpensive and getting more so. What does this stubborn clinging to the past say about our profession and our commitment to user service?
Another example. As a profession, we long ago abdicated access to the contents of books and serials. The slack has of course been picked up by private enterprise. One of the best recent improvements has been the incorporation of table of contents and other useful information from books into MARC records. Few of us can be surprised that the most creative and useful ideas come from the private sector, and not from the library profession.
A third example. InfoTrac 2000 gives everyone at my campus access to the full text of more than 1,000 journals and magazines. We use the vendor's user interface, search engine, and access points. We do not need to use the library's OPAC or any library software or hardware. We do not have to set foot in the library to get the information we need. For the moment, the library's part is simply to pay the bill. Will be long before we are under pressure to cancel the paper subscriptions for the journals covered by InfoTrac 2000? When will the administration decide to fund information resources like InfoTrac 2000 outside of the library? By the time publishers come out with intelligent documents containing their own access points and subjects, as well as any drivers needed for reading, printing, viewing, etc, library catalogues may potentially be completely bypassed so far as most users are concerned. Again, all the library may need to do is to pay the bill. Many deans will decide simply to give the money to the individual schools and bypass the library bureaucracy. A close precedent for this is the breakdown of the monolithic corporate computer center or MIS department, spurred by client-server technology and motivated by high costs. For many large corporations, the process of downsizing, outsourcing, and distributing computing power and expertise has been going on for a long time. The danger is that soon libraries that do not adapt will become something analogous to an IBM mainframe, a repository for "legacy documents" (books and journals in paper form).
In an earlier posting to this list, Arlene Taylor wrote that library technical services departments can perform "a tremendous service in organizing information." Libraries are doing less and less of this work now. Does she mean this service will come from librarians working for vendors? It seems to me at least an even bet that the "key descriptors" she says every intelligent document should have will come from the authors and publishers, not libraries. Only if libraries lead in creating new services, such as might result from national cooperative projects, can we hope to avoid the inexorable marginalization of our institutions and services.
The diffusion of well established and time-tested knowledge is inapplicable for emerging disciplines. We need new knowledge, or adaptation of old knowledge, and in particular, new skills, to enable us to satisfy needs we cannot satisfy now. The needs of most library people are basic, not advanced. Another way to put this is that for most library work, as for many other technical disciplines, theory follows practice. We in the profession educate ourselves. And we learn on the job the skills we need. Library school teachers surely have more to learn from practitioners than they have to teach us. When I was designing library software, I would have welcomed any useful input from theory. I did not find any.
The model I propose is that found in business and the technical disciplines. It is primarily the ability to do, to get results utilizing technology and managing people. Our field is dynamic, not static. No knowledge is permanent. Our work is best done in groups, collaboratively, not through solitary research. The criterion for evaluation of our work is the usefulness of the results, not our brilliance or genius. We must exploit to the fullest what technology makes available. As is the case for the recent engineering graduate, the useful half-life of what we learn will be brief, just a few years. If we are to survive we must 'proactively,' not reactively, adapt to the new technology. We librarians need to learn how to communicate with computer and information technology people. We need to know where hardware, software, and networking technology is going. We need to be able to gauge our users' needs and write up a set of specifications that make technical, business, and organizational sense. We need to do this in the context of tough budget discipline. In short, we need to act like entrepreneurs ("businessmen").
A presupposition of the topic of continuing education is that the solutions to library problems are knowledge or skills-based. This attitude is very prevalent. My prejudice is that...
The same thing is of course true for business. Our common problems are not usually like those of rocket science, but simple organizational ones. Simple to understand, much less simple to overcome. The last prejudice deals with this issue, which can perhaps be very roughly characterized as the transition from a paper-based, command-and-control hierarchy to an environment of software and documents managed by workgroups of well educated and well motivated people, who no longer need much control from "above."
Continuing education relating to organizational issues, quality, and reengineering can have an enormously productive effect on the profession. It would, I think, be preferable at this point to get this from business school teachers and business consultants than from library schools.
That library culture needs change will surprise few. As was pointed out by Margaret Slusser in an earlier posting, library culture does not often react positively "to someone who does something out of the group norm". This of course then discourages experimentation and the acquisition of new skills and competencies. Libraries are among the organizations least able to adapt to a model of self-directed workgroups, because of the lack of market discipline, of course, but principally because of our culture. Libraries are typically divided into functionally based fiefdoms jealously guarded by librarians defending their privilege, their administrative rank, and often their expert status. The authoritarian, the control freak, the expert all have much to lose and little to gain in the face of proposed change of this kind. Change is thus haphazard, and opposed by shunning, by disingenuous nitpicking, and by taking too narrow a view of what we do and why. Risk taking is dangerous; doing we have always done is safe.
Another negative aspect of library culture is opposition to business and the promotion of anti-technological values. This shows itself as an unproductive "Us versus them" attitude.
This brings me to a "subprejudice," the needless and increasingly unproductive discrimination against non-professionals in library work. As what is taught in library school continues to be largely irrelevant to library practice, maintaining a privileged class based on academic pedigree is less and less justified. (I speak as one with a useless Ph.D. from an ivy-league university.) Learning on the job is the most important kind of learning, but if we cannot promote non-professionals beyond a certain level, or cannot bring in people with business or computer degrees, we handicap ourselves quite needlessly.
According to the Council on Library/Media Technicians (COLT), the number of Library Assistant training programs dropped from 157 in 1981 to 115 in 1992. COLT bemoans this decline, and regrets that there is still no certificate for assistants. It seems to me that this is the wrong approach. If the problem is that admission to professional status requires the union card of an MLS, the solution is not to give assistants their own card, but to abolish the requirement. Business gets along very well judging people based on a bachelor's degree and what they have accomplished, not their pedigree. We can afford to do no less. A constructive suggestion. I would really like to see some kind of library group attempt to articulate a reasoned strategy for redefining or reengineering libraries. Members should have a good technical background, should know how business operates, and should have experience changing a library culture. "Backcasting," starting with the goals and then backtracking step by step to the present might be a good technique for this purpose. Concomitant with this there should be an effort by the group to define the organizational impediments to meaningful change and an effective strategy for overcoming them. Eventually the group should be expanded to include library vendors and publishers.
Mr. Kevil, in discussing his 1st point that "Libraries must radically transform themselves to survive," states:
In an earlier posting to this list, Arlene Taylor wrote that library technical services departments can perform "a tremendous service in organizing information." Libraries are doing less and less of this work now. Does she mean this service will come from librarians working for vendors? It seems to me at least an even bet that the "key descriptors" she says every intelligent document should have will come from the authors and publishers, not libraries. Only if libraries lead in creating new services, such as might result from national cooperative projects, can we hope to avoid the inexorable marginalization of our institutions and services.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that "SOME libraries are doing less and less of this work now." Without the word "some" we ignore those that are doing more: some technical services librarians are working hard to catalog materials on the internet; some are marking up electronic text and adding TEI headers (work that will increase as more text now only in hard copy is scanned into machine-readable forms); some are providing access to materials heretofore accessible only in a particular physical location: archives, manuscripts, art works, museum objects; many are continuing to provide access to items (found in every library, by the way) that require "original" cataloging. In addition I answer the question "Does she mean this service will come from librarians working for vendors?" with "Yes, that too." YAHOO recently hired a cataloger trained in library organization theory. Others have also begun to realize that people with a knowledge of theory of organization of information are "just what the doctor ordered" for dealing with the chaos out there.
And yes, the "key descriptors" for documents will initially be provided by the authors and publishers. But it will (and has) become rapidly apparent that information seekers cannot deal with the 10, 15, 20 synonymous ways of saying many concepts. The need for controlled vocabulary to deal with synonyms and various relationships among terms and concepts will be handled by people with background in organization theory.
Preparation for this enhanced way of looking at things starts with organization of information courses in schools of library and information science -- courses that have evolved to introduce students to the theoretical underpinnings of organizing information, including developments behind indexing, the documentation (now information science movement, archival description, as well as cataloging, and that introduce developing standards for handling electronic documents. This, however, addresses only those new to the profession. Mr. Kevil is so right when he says:
We need new knowledge, or adaptation of old knowledge, and in particular, new skills, to enable us to satisfy needs we cannot satisfy now. The needs of most library people are basic, not advanced. Another way to put this is that for most library work, as for many other technical disciplines, theory follows practice. We in the profession educate ourselves. And we learn on the job the skills we need. Library school teachers surely have more to learn from practitioners than they have to teach us.
(Well, I don't agree that "theory follows practice" always, but the rest seems right.) This has been a problem for me in being willing to say that library schools must provide continuing education for this area. I do have much to learn from practitioners. I do it every day by following the AUTOCAT, INTERCAT, USMARC, and other discussion groups. I find that by the time I plan a continuing education course I might present, things have changed so much that the description sent out months in advance would no longer be appropriate. I believe that continuing education may have to be given by practitioners (or at least largely assisted by them), using library school facilities.
Finally, I would like to comment on Mr. Kevil's "subprejudice" that "what is taught in library school continues to be largely irrelevant to library practice..." He believes that "Learning on the job is the most important kind of learning" and he seems to regret his "useless Ph.D. from an ivy-league university." He also states that "The diffusion of well established and time-tested knowledge is inapplicable for emerging disciplines," and that "when I was designing library software, I would have welcomed any useful input from theory [but] I did not find any." I am sorry that his education seemed not to be helpful to him. However, I suspect that he absorbed theory into his work of which he was not aware. People are not always aware of the basic understandings they have gleaned from their education. While learning on the job is very important, if that is all one has, there can be a certain provincialism in one's outlook that can only be seen by those who have looked at the "big picture" and know that there is a massive variety of ways of looking at things out there.
Could we also make sure our library science graduates are highly skilled in conceptual knowledge processing. History suggests that most of the practices in librarianship have theoretical bases in knowledge disciplines such as sociology, psychology, geography, history, mathematics just to mention some. Our profession has been records management focused and when we did move to automation, we did not seek to improve or enhance this process. Just think how we stayed with the batch-mode mind set in building on-line systems (so did the computer folk, at first).
We have a document developed by Lester Ashiem that could serve as a starting point for re-examining in our work environment -- what is appropriate for degree specialists, MLS librarians, BS library technical assistant, Associate Degree library assistants, etc. These need to be updated and taken seriously as we move to re-design the education of information professionals and training of technical support staffs.
I also would like for the practitioners to consider that some of the library educators were practitioners before they went to teach in library school, some are still providing technical assistance to libraries and getting paid for doing it. Quite a few of the practitioners are also teaching on an adjunct basis specialized courses in library schools.
Could we be a little more positive about our need to change and continue to learn?
 Home |
 Discussion |