Let's now focus on our new topic, "A New Paradigm for Excellence in Information Services," led by Sylvia Piggott who is currently the president of the Special Libraries Association. She has been senior manager for research and information services at one of Canada's largest financial institutions for almost 15 years. She has taught library automation as well as other information science courses in library and information science programmes in Montreal. Sylvia is a regular contributor at local and international conferences and to the library and information science literature on topics such the virtual library, the value of Internet resources, reengineering the library, reengineering the library services model. Her current interest is "Looking at excellence in library services: a holistic approach." Sylvia has a bachelor's in anthropology and a master's in library and information science from McGill University, and an ALA from the British Library Association. She is president of InfoPLUS, a research and knowledge management consulting company and editor of Business Information Review, a quarterly business journal published by Bowker-Saur in the United Kingdom.
Please join us in our new discussion.
One major change which is of interest to us is the blurring of the lines between the three Cs - computing, communications and the content industry (the information). This is part of the reason why competition for our jobs will largely come from highly qualified technical and communications professionals. Who gets the senior of leadership job will depend on the value system of the organization. In the case where the organization values computing skills more than any of the other two then the computing professional will get the leadership job, and so on. In other words, sometimes the information professional's senior position will be absorbed by one of the other disciplines. Of course, the information professional with the necessary skills and competencies can at least compete for the position and will sometimes be successful.
In this changing environment, the quality of the people in our profession needs to be a priority. Training programmes need to focus on elevating the standards of our profession. There will be need, in the foreseeable future, for traditional practices but it is evident that we need to test new theories and ideas in order to redefine our roles. We then need to design a curriculum to prepare our professionals for these new roles.
If in our new role we see ourselves as part of the senior management strategy team then we need the management skills to operate effectively at this level because as our influence increases we will be held much more accountable for the counsel we provide, the strategies we prepare and the statements we make.
To move into this era we need to develop best practices, in order to be recognized, and accepted as professionals rather than simply as providers of a service. As part of the process, we have to create a method of evaluation that enables clients and funding agencies to determine whether our work has been effective.
Our clients are becoming more and more adept at doing some things for themselves as a result of improved technology. They, therefore, require us to be information consultants who can advise on best sources and organization of knowledge rather than providing the information itself.
In a climate of downsizing and cost-cutting we need to convince management that the library services represent a core function and that the library's efforts show return on investment. It is therefore, imperative that we find creative ways to demonstrate our value.
In addition, it is crucial that the library service model be reengineered to meet the requirements of the current environment as well as to take us into the new millennium. This model should be strategic rather than tactical, proactive rather than reactive.
Our two major concerns for our profession must be:
Let us hear from those of you who have an interest in the questions posed.
Sylvia packed a very tight piece of current speak techno/management babble -- which perhaps contained a simpler message such as "look out guys, the woods are burning." I was intrigued by the assumption that the born-again library folk need to be part of the senior management of this "whatever it is process" by right rather than by evolution forward from original professional formation with the requirement to skill up to take on the wider skills involved in senior management.
Oh and a simple warning about babies and bath water when you explore the need for a "all things to all people" tendency in the evolution of the LIS curriculum.
OK so it is Monday morning -- may the semester get better!
There are a number of librarians within the state who aren't happy about the change, seeing the new curriculum as moving too far away from traditional library practices that librarians need in the real world. In my recent job hunt over the spring and early summer, I found a predominance of the position openings required or preferred expertise in information services, resources, and/or technology, especially among academic libraries. Interestingly enough, there were also still quite a number of requests for catalogers.
I believe this is indicative of the tension currently felt within the profession: we are surging ahead with electronic information while we struggle to maintain the existing practices of accessing and organizing information. While this can be difficult, it is not necessarily a bad thing. If the lines between computing, communication and content are blurring, as they appear to be, we must be flexible enough to live in the gray areas while we await the sorting out. We are in a transition period to something new that has not yet been fully defined. Unfortunately, that requires us to maintain competencies in both existing and emerging practices.
Most librarians have been through the experience of providing a desired service before really having the resources to provide that service, in order to prove that the resources are needed and the service is necessary. Use of the new technologies and the providing of new electronic services can be viewed the same way. The desire for service is definitely there. For every client adept at doing things for him/herself, there are many more who need all the help we can give them in accessing information, understanding the organization of information, sifting through and analyzing information to find what they need, and blending together methods of obtaining information from various sources and formats. This kind of assistance is what my clients most need from me, what I thought librarians have always been about, and what I expect librarians will continue to be about. These are the kinds of cross-medium and cross-technology skills that need to be included in the library and information services curriculum. The more we can find proactive ways of demonstrating our knowledge and ability in these skills, the more ways we find to demonstrate our value to our clients and society at large.
It is Thursday -- and I'm feeling good today.
I have spoken with a couple of students/recent graduates about this "paradigm" stuff. They are fed up with it. This is their world. They see no paradigms shifting. They don't want to hear their professors talking about paradigms. Get on with life! I had never looked on it in this way, but I sort of see their point. The "older" librarians may need to look at changing patterns, but the young people are already a part of the new world. Does anyone else see this?
The "blurring of the lines" is only making more work and more training for our profession. It is too bad that we need to divest some of our skills and training in order to be able to pick up the new skills! Have other professions ever done this? Do chemists stop learning about some types of substances when new ones are discovered? Do doctors stop learning about some "old" disease when new ones crop up? Must we stop teaching the older skills in order to fit in the other two "C"s?
As an active member of several library and information associations, I think that partnerships between the schools and the association would be extremely beneficial. With the lack of continuing education requirements in our profession, there can be some who will slip and not be up-to-date with new developments. The partnerships would provide benefits in both directions. Students would have more direction for what they will need out in the field. Professionals would be more in touch with what is being taught and would have opportunities to teach and to learn themselves. Are there any very successful partnerships going on right now?
I hope this excellent discussion heats up next week. I have more comments to make, but don't want to hog the lines.
In chemistry, many of the old standbys have been found to be out-of-date for todays ills or whatever. The old needs to be studied to contrast with the new; so that we can know when the new is "new" and not really the "old" covered in new cloth.
By the way, what is wrong with conceptually and logically presenting what we claim that support the practice of the profession. Or do we just practice without understanding why we are doing it.
I'll quickly say that you are right about the new breed -- those in training are getting much of what we are talking about here. Some schools are and have updated their curriculum. Our two library schools here in Montreal have been doing this for the past 3-5 years and the graduates are ready for the brave new world so to them there is no paradigm shift. Practitioners teaching in many of the programmes are bringing into the curriculum some of the 'real-world' business and management practices being used. Those Practitioners who have not had the opportunity to update their education and training are the ones that are at a disadvantage. Associations such as SLA and ALA could facilitate their access to continuing education in institutions of higher learning by collaborating with library schools to allow professionals to take some courses without working towards a degree.
As far as changes in the curriculum is concerned, it may be interesting to do some research on library schools that have merged with other faculties to see if the merger has resulted in any changes in the curriculum. For example, have the students benefited from the expertise of the professors in the other discipline?
I want to address Sylvia's suggestion for discussion on "competencies necessary to remain viable . . . "
I suggest that we must examine what a library (the institution) does and ask ourselves whether or not this is within the competence of a single profession. Our profession's American history suggests that our post-Dewey (and, subsequently, ALA sanctioned) emphasis on "library economy" came at the expense of a wider vision.
ALA did not start out as a professional association (nor, technically, is it now), but as an organization of senior librarians concerned with institutional issues such as cooperation and bibliographic standards. It can be argued that our profession's long standing technical focus is due to the technical nature of the MLS, not to the requirements of librarianship.
The MLS answered the need for catalogers at a time when libraries faced great expansion pressures. But, as a result of the MLS being the only advanced library degree, librarianship soon came to be what people holding an MLS did. This tautology needs examination.
My own view of the matter is best seen by analogy. The library is like a factory, where raw material (items) are processed into a product (an organized collection). Unfortunately, this is insufficient as far as the public is concerned since many (most?) of them are either unable to use the catalog or unable to determine what they wish to purchase. Sales requires people to help define these needs and thus generate outputs.
These outputs, in the library world, are the various services: reference, readers' advisory, children's services, etc. Their natural orientation is not to the collection, per se, but to the information they need in order to interact with the consumer. They are, as such, expert library users.
I thus argue that while we must, of course, adopt the technical services/bibilographic issues to an emerging electronic environment we must not forget that the "output" personnel have education requirements that are almost totally unconnected to the "input" side. I would further argue that these have more to do with specific "cultural literacies" (or "social epistemologies," to use Shera's terminology) than with librarianship as it has been taught.
Anne Abate wrote:
The question, as I see it, is how the IS/LS field will evolve to meet the needs of the next generation of knowledge seekers. Which leads to one of Anne's following points ...
It is my position that as the concepts of Knowledge Management, and more specifically of just-in-time knowledge development and acquisition gain wider acceptance, there will be a ground swell of interest in that Bill Summers refers to when he said:
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