We now turn to a discussion of "Doctoral Education" which will be hosted by Dr. Gary M. Olson. Dr. Olson is professor and associate dean in the School of Information, professor in the Department of Psychology, and director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) at the University of Michigan where he has been on the faculty since 1975. A joint appointment brought him to the School of Information in 1995. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota and graduate degrees from Stanford University, all in psychology. His research interests are in human-computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work. For the past half-dozen years his work has focused on computer and communication support for real-time work by groups whose members are geographically dispersed.
Please join us for a discussion of "Doctoral Education."
Thus, it makes sense to have a discussion about the nature of doctoral training in light of the many changes that are taking place in schools and departments around the country. To get us going, here are some of the key issues that I've been talking to people about:
I look forward to our discussion over the next two weeks.
So, I am glad to see that more Schools are moving in he direction mentioned by Michigan. The only problem is communicating your expertise in the academy. Most individuals do not think of librarians as being competent in management, statistics, or strategic planning because they do not realize that study at the doctoral level moves more to a discipline focus for research purposes.
A side issue might be, what is the purpose of the doctorate in library science? Should it be a research degree or a more applied degree?
My own view is that the Ph.D. is primarily a research degree. But the debate as to whether there should be a doctoral level degree that focuses on practice (e.g., teaching, administration ...) and should be called something else has an extensive history.
At Texas Woman's University, we tell our doctoral students that the doctoral degree is a research and scholarly degree, and that they should not view it as an advanced professional degree. The purpose of our program is to foster learning and scholarship about librarianship, in the broadest sense. While I do not doubt for a moment that there are many fruitful avenues for achieving better understanding of librarianship, including the patrons, services, and institutions and collections, I am troubled by the idea that a doctoral program ought to be driven by a market. Markets shift, are in constant flux.
To put it simply, do others perceive the doctoral degree as scholarly degree or a professional certificate?
The immediate answer from someone will be "It's both" but that dodges the issue.
As for interdisciplinarity: That's what this field has been, to a large extent, for a long time. Even those areas that we might WANT to claim as our own, such as information retrieval, often draw significant contribution from outside "disciplines" (e.g., computer science, computational linguistics, HCI, etc.). Whether we bring those outsiders aboard the school of information studies (information school, college of information science and technology, et al), or send our students and faculty out to other units that house those disciplines is more an organizational/behavioral question than an intellectual one. A multidisciplinary unit may help develop focus and continuity of effort and increased collaboration among the disciplines. In the past 25 years, we've been an interdisciplinary unit. We've had on our FT faculty people with higher degrees in philosophy, operations research, clinical psychology, engineering, computer science, anthropology, education, information systems, software engineering -- and these always outnumbered the library and information science Ph.D.s, I believe. But we've still sent a doctoral student with a particular research interest out to units of Drexel and other universities where special expertise exists. It isn't likely or desirable to have all needed expertise in house.
At the same time, there are programs that operate in models different from ours (e.g., patching disciplinary collaboration together, ad hoc) and they seem to work, too. There may not be a single organizational solution to the interdisciplinarity question. The critical concern is maintaining effective interdisciplinarity connections.
As a University of Michigan graduate, I have watched the changes in the transformation of the School of Library Science (my era) to the School of Library and Information Studies to the School of Information. I think the Michigan program is a leader in the education of information professionals, particularly in starting to help the library profession make the transformation from "librarians" to "information professionals." This is not an easy thing to do and is probably worth a different discussion by itself. The problem with programs like Michigan is getting to them. Directors like me are not likely to quit jobs or ask for/get a leave of absence to attend the U Michigan. Naturally, the previous discussion on distance learning should enter here again -- can doctoral programs be successfully taught and completed despite geographic distance? Anyway, the point is that the Michigan program seemingly offers more than a traditional education curriculum or a traditional library science curriculum.
The issue for discussion is not only where to find a Ph.D. program but whether it matters which program to enter! Finding out about Ph.D. programs is easy enough for a librarian to do, but it would also help if doctoral programs used some marketing sense and found ways to advertise the uniqueness/specialness of their programs (library educators, like the librarians they taught, may not necessarily be good at selling themselves)! However, if I'm stuck in a locale with a limited program, I may be forced to make do, and like a good librarian, learn to teach myself the topic I am most interested in pursuing. It seems that minimally any Ph.D. program would teach me how to do research and that it would assist me in starting a research project in a unique area. The program, including teachers, mentors, colleagues and resources, are all critical to success in completing the degree (i.e., getting the unique research project/dissertation completed), and that is why programs like Michigan may be more successful in attracting students, because they have all the resources together in one spot. But if I'm stuck in a position or a locale without access to good programs, and am still interested in learning and improving my career, then I may settle for the best possible program in my reach and learn from others via 'published' information.
Maybe this view is a little naive, but I hope it adds another view to the discussion.
There are two issues involved here: the nature of advanced research and theory in LIS, and what kind of preparation is needed by a high-level academic librarian. To deal with the latter first, the MLIS is supposed to be a terminal degree; it should prepare a person to go all the way to the top. We feel our two-year degree at UCLA does that. The doctorate is normally preparation for work in research and teaching -- i.e., a different career path.
Getting a doctorate is therefore normally not needed for any library position. Academia being what it is, however, and the growing complexity of library mgmt and the unpredictability of our increasingly info-oriented society, I could well understand that an academic librarian might want to get a deeper understanding. There have occasionally been programs with applied doctorates in our field -- UC Berkeley has had that; I don't know if they still do -- which is intended to be comparable to the Ed.D. in education. Such degrees end with dissertations, but with more applied topics than is usually the case for the Ph.D.
Let us now deal with the first issue. Let us suppose that our academic librarian says, no, I don't want an applied degree. I want a Ph.D. to have credibility among the academics with which I work; I want the Ph.D. so I can understand, from the inside out, the process of research that my clients go through daily; and I want a Ph.D. because I really want to dig into research and theory, regardless of questions of immediate applicability of results. In this case, I can't imagine why a librarian wouldn't want to get a Ph.D. in our field!
Don't you think there's any "there" there?! Believe me, there is. The only problem our field has is that researchers are too thin on the ground. The issues that are specifically OURS, the ones that no one else has as much interest in, or background to study, are HUGE; they go on and on, usually with hardly anyone studying them.
I believe that LIS -- or informatics -- is in a position analogous to the social sciences at the end of the 19th century. Then the social sciences were seen as flaky and marginal. Few people understood them or took them seriously in academic terms. Our field covers a vast territory, but is seen as unimportant or even non-existent because people are still stuck in old concepts of what it is that academics study.
I can understand that people outside our field might fail to understand this, but please let us not fail to take our own field seriously from within the field! Such a judgment would have nothing to do with the content of our field, but rather only with its historically low social status.
We need to be sure that we know what business that we are in (our mission) and that we are anticipating and meeting the changing needs of the populations that we serve. We need to be operationally effective and cost-efficient in the process.
Our educational programs MUST prepare professionals that are effective and efficient in the information business. Educational and service organizations as not-for-profit entities are not exempt from good business practice (that is part of being accountable).
Subject: A Human-Centered Discipline
I could not agree more with Rosmarie Fouad that people ought to be at the center of the new emerging information disciplines. My own scientific specialty is human-computer interaction, and I have been advocating human-centered design of computer systems for over a decade. I also agree that this human-centered philosophy ought to be at the core of our educational programs. Information itself is vacuous except for the purposes to which humans wish to put it. For me, as a newcomer to the School of Information, this focus on people's needs is the most attractive component of the tradition of librarianship of my colleagues.
Subject: Where Should the Expertise Reside?
I very much like Thomas Childers' points about organizational matters, and I agree that it is an open question as to how we should organize ourselves for the kind of multidiscipinary training that is required for information professionals. We're doing two things here at Michigan. First, many of us who have been information professionals in other parts of the university are moving our appointments into the School of Information because we have a strong hunch that a new intellectual alignment is in the works, and that this will be easier to pull off if we are organizationally together. This is a big bet, and we'll see over the next 5-10 years if this works. But we are also building collaborative educational initiatives into our programs. We have had discussions already about such things as joint degrees and less formal kinds of educational collaborations with the Business School, the School of Social Work, the Law School, the Medical School, the Art School, the School of Education, and others. I expect our students will take courses and interact with faculty and students from these and other parts of the university. We do not intend to create an island, but want to be richly connected with the rest of the university.
Subject: Getting to Places like Michigan
James Shedlock raises an extremely important point about the practical difficulties involved in choosing a Ph.D. program while somewhere along one's career path. We certainly find a variety of financial and geographic constraints among the students applying for our doctoral program. We have had a rapid growth in the research funding in our school, and we are now able to offer financial aid to all incoming doctoral students. But in many cases this does not go far enough. I'm not sure I have a good answer other than the obvious one of taking advantage of good opportunities in your local area if they exist. I predict, though, that one outcome of the new alliances that are driving the changes in ILS schools is that more money will be available for PhD training at many places.
I also think we have to be more creative about using distance technologies to allow more flexible participation in Ph.D. programs. There is a part of Ph.D. training that is very intensive and personal, requiring a mentoring relationship that is difficult to do without co-location. But there may be a wider range of arrangements that we need to explore. Ph.D. training is minimally about taking courses, which is the easiest part of education to do at a distance. Learning how to do research from an experienced researcher is much harder to do at a distance.
Subject: Is This a Field?
I guess I'd like Marcia Bates to speculate on how to bring about the kind of change she would like to see. How do you get people to study the huge issues that go on and on? The new alliances we are seeing as ILS schools transform themselves seems to me to be one approach. What are others?
I want to discuss the issue under the aspect that there are two different, complementary types of postgraduate education and training:
In the natural sciences, there is "pure" and "applied" research. In both domains, Ph.D. degrees can be earned. Similar differentiations between basic research and research which comprises rather components of applications can also be found in the social sciences for instance. Seen in this light, it does not matter whether a doctorate in library and information science treats more "pure" or more "applied" aspects; but at any rate, the doctoral thesis must be executed as a research project.
Because the outcome of the doctoral work is not predictable at the beginning, this sort of postgraduate endeavor is "open-ended."
To 2:
This second type of postgraduate qualification is expected to improve professional knowledge and skills of the participants.
Curricular specialization is neither research-based nor open-ended; on the contrary, the outcome is circumscript. It is usually structured including teaching, practices and a final evaluation of the candidates.
Both ways of postgraduate study have their specific qualities and values. Succinctly phrased, a doctorate prepares for an academic career as a teacher/researcher, whereas a curricular specialization develops a specific professional capacity.
LIS-faculties should consider to:
For instance, changing names has rarely led to change in substance. Rather, thinking about substance first, and name later, has sometimes made some difference. One good example of this is the program at Syracuse University, initiated by Roger Greer, and nurtured by Robert Taylor. Another is the Ph.D. Program in Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University. Still another was the program in Information Science in the Communication Faculty of the Free University Berlin. The program at UCLA is an interesting and important case, in that, without a name change, they have developed a very strong and important interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. Among other ways in which they have accomplished this is to hire faculty from a variety of disciplines, who are all interested in the same basic problems that Marcia alludes to.
In general, interdisciplinarity works when there is some agreement on the problems and issues to be addressed, and on the relevance of the different approaches to the problem. It also works when the people who engage in it are themselves interdisciplinary (or become so). In this sense, library and information science/studies has long been an interdisciplinary field, at least at some venues. But this approach should not be confused with multidisciplinarity, in which different disciplines might address the same general topic, but without any attempt at integration of results, and with the interests of the individual disciplines most significant. Some cognitive science programs are examples of this type of structure.
So I guess that some concluding comments to this rather rambling message are:
What did I like most about my Ph.D. education ? My mentor asked me to take courses outside of those that I majored in college to meet the course requirements of the program. I was a psych major in college. At the master's and Ph.D. levels I took the following courses: astrophysics, advanced economics; classification theory (Teachers College, IBM Watson Labs), neurology, mythology, genetics... and all this to support a Ph.D. in psychology. There was a lesson to be learned from this and I learned it from my mentor.
The student should also consider the following questions: Are the faculty actually publishing anything, getting grants and doing real research? Has the school a good track record of placing Ph.D. graduates on other faculties? Also, as the dissertation is the most important element of the Ph.D., if a student is serious about being an academic and researcher they need find a school with recognized researchers who will: be their advisors and mentors, chair their dissertation committee, co-publish and involve them in research, and help them get a faculty position. That's why I chose the Rutger's University Doctoral Program for my Ph.D.
Too many Ph.D. students do not approach Ph.D. work in a serious manner. They have no idea why they are at a particular school, what the faculty is good for or their research interest. They also make the mistake of going to the nearest school without seriously considering their academic future. Ph.D. students need to realize that academia is very competitive. A student's Ph.D. education, research, grantsmanship, and ultimate success as an academic and researcher are strongly shaped and grounded in their doctoral experience and the quality of the faculty at the school they select.
First, the program had to be rigorous, and had to have the concommitant quality of instruction associated with academic rigor. The coursework had to apply to both my job duties and to my interests, or I fear I would not have persevered, though in the hunt for tenure, a Ph.D. is a valuable weapon in a librarians arsenal. Faculty reputation plays a part in this process as well.
Second, the program had to be physically accessible, which is a major difficulty in a Carnegie Comprehensive I small university town in mid-Missouri. I would like to have had more educational options, but geographically I found myself limited more than might otherwise be the case.
The primary questions for the applicant should be: Am I willing to commit four years of my career and does the institution offer the program I want? A passionate sense of direction will tame the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune on the way to a Ph.D.
The next important question is the record of producing Ph.D.s. The track record of their major professor will show the student what to expect. Professors with many applicants and many grants are motivated to get results and move students through the system. This varies a lot by individual within departments.
Availability of $$ is a factor, too.
I liked best:
The contacts I made with other students in my field; we continue to enjoy and support each other.
The tools and breadth of knowledge that I continue to draw on.
I liked least:
The person who tried to discourage me from taking a course on college teaching; the course was a winner that helped me a lot.
The subordinate position of the graduate student; I vowed never again to place myself in such a dependent role.
For an enjoyable evening with some interesting takes on the academic experience, rent the video "Creator," issued in the early '80s. Biotechnology figures in the plot, so science-oriented people will especially enjoy it.
>We have had some discussion already of the following two questions, but it would be interesting to hear more about these: >If you are considering going for a Ph.D., what matters are important to you in picking a school to attend?
I really had hoped to avoid entering into this discussion since my last comment during the open discussion period landed me an invitation to moderate a discussion later this fall. However since Gary asked about people who are considering doctoral work... that's me (and I happen to be an expert in that topic).
In my life, the big decision was whether to go to college at all. There was a time in my life when I was fairly happy and confident I could make a nice living with music, but at some point I broke down and went back to school. A large part of that for me was family/social pressure. Both my parents hold advanced degrees, and both my mother's and father's side of the family are littered with educators. Considering education, I seem to have an affinity toward higher education. So, from the day I made the decision to go back to school, I had always planned in the back of my mind to do the "whole enchilada" -- the Ph.D.
At this point, I'm fairly well into a career path in higher education... I guess I will make a final decision on the Ph.D. in the next few years. But more to the question at hand, there are (for me) three main factors in the go/no-go equation (ranked in order of importance):
>Don't you think there's any "there" there?! Believe me, there is.
Yes I do believe. The point is, there are tons of things about which one can be curious and could be used to satisfy ones research needs at the doctoral level. Working in the field of librarianship (or more broadly, the information industry) there are probably even more topics for Ph.D. research than there are in many, many other disciplines due to the very broad range of employment opportunities and the interdisciplinary nature of much of our work.
>There are two issues involved here: the nature of advanced research and theory in LIS, and what kind of preparation is needed by a high-level academic librarian. To deal with the latter first, the MLIS is supposed to be a terminal degree; it should prepare a person to go all the way to the top.
Although I agree with Marcia's general notion that there is a core of material around which a number of ripe applied and theoretical research opportunities exist, I disagree with her assessment on the latter of her two points. I'm not exactly sure what that core set of competencies we all need to learn in order to earn the "terminal" degree should be (I have my opinion, but will hold it for now), but like pornography... I know it when I see someone with those skills. And it is my gut feeling that there is too much "baptism by fire" on the front lines of our profession.
I do not believe the MLS is adequate preparation for professionals in this field, especially those who aspire to work in higher education. I'm fairly certain this is true of the traditional one year time-frame (B.S./B.A. plus fifth year library certificate) for such a degree, and I find it largely true of the graduates I've talked to from the two year institutions like UCLA and Michigan as well (although I will grudgingly admit the second year does help and should probably be mandatory).
In fact, a very large part of academic librarianship seemingly functions with an implicit assumption that the graduates it will get are not adequately prepared. Even our entry level job descriptions are routinely written with the statement, "three years of experience required." A decade ago, I went into a residency program Beverly Lynch created at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I was never expecting to be rewarded for the fact that I had six years of increasingly more responsible academic library experience before library school as well as two full years of master's degree study (including nine credit hours in Aberystwyth, Wales). But I sure wasn't expecting to be penalized for that fact either. In a way, I was...
I can understand things like a lower academic staff rating (non-faculty), lower pay scale, and non-support or lower-support for professional activities like conferences. In fact, I went into the institution knowing those restrictions were in place. But I found it really difficult to deal with the fact that most of the professional staff in the organization operated from the point of view that residents were "baby" librarians, lacking the skills to contribute anything meaningful to the workplace. However, this fairly well summarizes the attitudes of most of the faculty librarians at UIC at that time. The entire program was structured with an implicit assumption that the institution needed to augment the skills of these already "educated" people, not just to provide them an entry level environment for gaining experience. Something has caused such attitudes to come into being in the first place... I tend to want to conclude undereducated graduates.
Marcia continues:
>Let us now deal with the first issue. Let us suppose that our academic librarian says, no, I don't want an applied degree. I want a Ph.D. to have credibility among the academics with which I work; I want the Ph.D. so I can understand, from the inside out, the process of research that my clients go through daily; and I want a PhD because I really want to dig into research and theory, regardless of questions of immediate applicability of results. In this case, I can't imagine why a librarian wouldn't want to get a Ph.D. in our field!
Marcia, your last sentence is really what prompted me to write this. So, let me tell you why. It is a given -- I don't want an applied degree. Certainly not at the Ph.D. level.
Yet, despite my agreement with you that there is a lot of unclaimed research material and that there are good reasons to pursue it other than to pursue the applied path, I really don't think I want a Ph.D. in this field. To understand why, you need to recall my three points above:
I am mainly interested in the technology, networks, and information systems aspects of our profession. I think that is the future. The trouble is that technology is applicable to virtually any other discipline as well as to "traditional" library and information science. The technology has become a tool that is forcing people to learn certain aspects of the traditional library profession. As a result, other programs are eating up topic areas that I firmly believe should be the sole purview (or at least the majority ownership) of librarians.
There are other places I can go to study what interests me.
I still might like to try my hand at that, someday. A PhD from a library school will certainly work for me there. But a PhD from a library school may be a liability to me, speaking from a career point of view, in order to pursue other avenues of employment within higher education. The U Michigan campus has some very good examples of the emerging ground in higher education that I am interested in targeting -- the Integrated Technology Instruction Center on North Campus, Van Houweling's new position vis a vis curriculum design, etc. I see no evidence that anybody in higher education is looking toward the library profession for leadership on this frontier. Yes, there are usually opportunities for talented people with library credentials, but that is different than the campus community looking toward your profession for leadership. And while the library PhD may not hinder me per se, if I wanted to pursue senior CIO-type positions in higher education, I can see how several other degrees would assist me to a much greater degree. Ultimately, I think all the folks working with automated systems in higher education are going to be doing the same basic work -- librarian and non-librarian alike, that is part of the nature of digital convergence.
So, I want to keep my options open.
Here's my problem. Neither point two nor point three taken by itself would sway me that much. I have contacts in the library profession, and the easy path to go would certainly be to pursue the Ph.D. in library science. But the problem becomes the chemistry between number two and three. Weighed together, those two factors are really influencing my thinking.
Speaking frankly, there are only two (maybe three) library schools I would consider attending for a Ph.D. at this point in time. When you start to factor the other things (cost, quality of life, ease of access to campus resources, etc.) I'm hard pressed to see how a Ph.D. from such a select group of library school programs can offer me anything a growing number of non-traditional Ph.D. programs won't support just as well, maybe better. Nobody is ever going to take my MLS degree away. But I really don't see it as an essential building block for getting to the Ph.D. or the career opportunities to which I aspire.
The people that really excite me are scholars like Linda Harasim pioneering online education, Tom Reeves with interactive multimedia and Australia's John Hedberg with the pioneering multimedia ecology package, Exploring Lake Illuka. Their work has implications for librarians and I have enrolled in Hedberg's Information Technology in Education program in a Faculty of Education rather than a traditional doctoral program in librarianship. This gives me more options such as moving across to a higher education research unit or a Centre for Technology and Learning as well as traditional library roles.
Just as an example of the payoffs -- I am doing some course work units and in the first two sessions have found myself in videoconferences with the other half of the class in another city as well as using the WWW, E-mail, chat and a collaborative work software site in Germany to engage in a joint project with students from the other city. I am learning a lot from being at the cutting edge of technology based education as a student. It will enrich my thinking about academic library practice.
I also wanted a program which emphasized teaching, research and service. While the Ph.D. is first a research degree, I would not want to be a researcher if I cannot teach. So I chose the program at Texas Woman's University, because it emphasized the kind of balance I would like to build on and bring to the classroom as an LIS educator.
Craig's comments are very thoughtful, and express eloquently the pivotal point we are at in the field. What he wants to specialize in is, as far as I'm concerned, exactly in the heart of our field, and I see unique knowledge in our field associated with that area (more on that in a moment). So why the debate? I think the heart of the question he is touching on is a sociological one, not an intellectual one dealing with the subject matter of our field. This a time of exploding interest in information. After being an ignored stepchild for decades, suddenly info, information transfer (on the Net), and associated things are cool, and enormous amounts of political, social, and economic capital are flowing into the area. Suddenly all sorts of people are interested in the subject. Meanwhile, the general public perception of our field is not "cool"; we're seen as retro, and are widely misunderstood.
The challenge, then, is can we compete successfully to establish what we feel is our turf, both in the academic world and in the larger society, and can we shift those perceptions in time to survive and thrive. The Craig Summerhills of our society are now making their decisions about where to commit.
Craig, you were questioning whether other elements on campus look to LIS people for leadership. You get that to happen by leading. It's an open game right now; different things are happening on different campuses. Where people lead, that's where the action will happen. If librarians are out in front on information issues and info technology, people will follow.
Now, as to this question about whether there is material to study that is unique to our field. At the professional level, I have been arguing various places that no other profession has the unique mix of knowledge that we have of information and information organization, people's behavior in relation to information, and information technology.
At a more abstract level, I think it is useful to start with Bill Paisley's idea (he wouldn't word it just this way) that some fields slice up the academic spectrum by taking an area of nature or society to study--psychology studies individual mental processes, sociology studies group processes within a society, anthropology whole cultures (sloppy definitions, but you get the idea). Similar distinctions can be made across the humanities and natural sciences. Paisley argued that some fields don't work that way, they cut across other fields. Education , LIS, communication, and journalism are all examples of fields that may relate in some way to many of the conventional fields simultaneously, while not being a part of those fields. Though they need to relate to the conventional fields, and in some cases expertise in those fields may be useful, there is nonetheless unquestionably a body of knowledge and one or more research paradigms that are unique to these fields and which are not shared by either the conventional fields or the other orthogonal ones.
At the doctoral level, I think we in LIS are unique in:
Well, I've gone on long enough.
And a related question: with all of the changes that are taking place in formerly straight ILS schools, how do you factor these changes into making decisions about where to pursue a Ph.D.?
Rather than see this as a potential invasion of intellectual turf, it is important to take this opportunity to educate other disciplines and publics about how much attention scholars in LIS have paid to topics that are now "hot" (however old-hat they are to US).
There has been a rediscovery of both information retrieval and the library. Good dissertation topics abound. It is a good time to attract talented young scholars into LIS doctoral programs.
I have heard some emotional comments when one library school teacher indicated that she was a social researcher. In truth, she really was a capable social researcher who focused on studies that advanced community analysis and some other important areas that supported librarianship. So let us see where this goes.
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