It is time to turn to a discussion of "certification." This topic was mentioned several times amongst the suggestions for new topics in CRISTAL-ED LISTSERV volume 6. In fact, the topic was so popular that a "mini discussion" took place on "certification" during the period of new-topic suggestions. Drew Racine is our guest editor for "certification." Drew is presently deputy assistant director and library and information science bibliographer, University of Texas General Libraries, Austin, Texas. He is a member of the ALCTS Education Committee, a representative to the ALA Education Assembly, and ALCTS Liaison to the ACRL Task Force on Certification.
Thanks Drew for taking on the guest editorship of the CRISTAL-ED LISTSERV for a two-week discussion on certification.
Thanks to Karen for permitting a discussion about Certification on Cristal-Ed. As Karen has told you, I am a liaison to the ACRL Certification Task Force and we are in our information gathering phase. We want to hear from you about many issues surrounding certification of librarians. Please send us your opinions.
Keith Cottam, in an earlier post here, mentioned the need for an historical perspective on this topic in the U.S. I wonder if you might briefly provide us with some perspective based on your experience, Keith? Thanks.
Keith also pointed out that we want to discuss certification, not licensing. Licensing is an act of the state giving a person a legal right to practice a profession or occupation within that state's jurisdiction. Certification is voluntary self-regulation by a profession to protect the interests of the public and of the profession. Certification is recognition by a professional organization or independent external agency that an individual is qualified to practice a profession or occupation.
Many librarians in the United States can gain certification now: school librarians in many states, medical librarians, and others. Librarians in the United Kingdom and Australia have certification programs leading to full certification as Chartered Librarians. But many librarians in the United States do not have the option of gaining certification.
In order to start the ball rolling, I want to make several statements that (I hope) will elicit comment from you. Don't think you must limit your discussion to responding to these statements, but addressing them will help the ACRL Task Force. Thanks for your help.
The following comments address the aspect of certification that allows a "certified" information professional, "...to keep full certification ... through completion a minimum number of continuing education hours each year."
Certification of library and information service providers should be an important topic to us in both our professional and our educator roles. Dubin wrote that without a commitment to lifelong learning, professional obsolescence is inevitable. He used the concept of "half-life" from nuclear physics to measure obsolescence in professional specialties.
"The half-life of professional competency is defined as the time after completion of professional training when because of new developments, practicing professionals become roughly half as competent as they were upon graduation."
Does Dubin's formula exaggerate the situation? I think not. With the remarkable convergence of communication, information, and media technologies I wonder about the current "half-life" for professional competency among today's information professionals? Perhaps we also should consider professional competency from the user's perspective instead of our own. Don't our users of information services expect information service providers to be "current" in their skills and knowledge of providing information access?
It would be great if all in the workforce were highly motivated life-long learners. Let's assume that we are all highly motivated, life-long learners. Wouldn't it be terrific if employing institutions were "nudged" through requirements professional certification to support and to facilitate ongoing continuing education and "retooling?"
It should be noted that I recommend certification not only for LIS professionals working in information service centers, but also to those of us who teach.
>"The half-life of professional competency is defined as the time after completion of professional training when because of new developments, practicing professionals become roughly half as competent as they were upon graduation."
This assumes that the professional does not learn new skills and competencies on the job. That is not true. If it were then where would the teachers of those new skills come from?
I do agree that most institutions do not provide an opportunity for staff to develop new skills -- whether taught by others or developed by self-study. However, with the business sector emphasizing their needs for trained staff, and life-long learning, can the public service sector be far behind?
Another way is to take a more pragmatic approach and to recognize certification as a way to encourage (or ensure) continuing education among professionals. In addition to the MLS degree a professional get as one's credential, one can add titles of certification in certain areas of specialty upon finishing a prescribed number of continuing education credits. Different professional organizations may wish to sponsor certification programs and offer titles of certifications for their own professional areas; for examples, SAA for archival and preservations, and ASIS for information brokerage, etc.
The values of titles of certification among different sponsors may vary according to the credential of the sponsors and market demand. Certification will certainly cost a little for individual LIS professionals. But, I think given time certification will be a good investment for a profession like ours.
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What about the rest of you? If ALA should start certifying librarians, it will affect you as a librarian and as people who hire librarians. Let's hear your thoughts about this topic during the second week.
Thanks to those who have contributed and thanks in advance to those who will contribute in the second week.
This discussion seems to me related to the "librarian image" issue that American Libraries loves to tout. It's a dependent variable, not a determining one. If we and our profession do well we won't have to worry about either image or certification. If we're not doing well it won't make any difference.
>What about the rest of you? If ALA should start certifying librarians, it will affect you as a librarian and as people who hire librarians. Let's hear your thoughts about this topic during the second week.
Well, here are my thoughts.
Personally, I think that certification is a great idea. Requiring continuing education seems like a no-brainer, since, after all, everything's changing so quickly a MLS is pretty much outdated by the time it's received.
The problem with certification, in my mind, is the cost. Many institutions can't or won't pay for their staff members' CE. This would leave it up to the individual librarians to pay for their own certification costs.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't afford it! Especially when ALA and all its divisions are raising their dues. I feel I have to belong to ALA and ACRL to demonstrate my commitment to my career; that's a couple hundred bucks a year already, and then to have to pay another couple hundred on CE would pretty well break my bank account! And I have the feeling that I'm not alone in thinking this way; especially among us relatively-new-to-the-profession- and-making-considerably-under-30K crowd.
If there were a way to keep the associated costs down, I'd be an ardent supporter of certification. As I see it now, though, it would be a tough call to decide who's not certified because they don't care and who's not certified because they can't afford to keep up with the certification requirements.
This discussion has focused on certification as a means of providing evidence of continuing education for librarians. How about using certification as the means to prepare untrained people to be librarians or information specialists?
A critical and strategic reason for developing the certification model is the continuing pressure on universities to streamline their curricula and drop unprofitable programs, of which Library Science, or Info Science, or whatever you call it, is a component. If, instead of certifying schools, we, the profession, certified people, a different model of professional training might be developed which could offer opportunities to many people who cannot now take advantage of 15 or 18 month MLS programs. There must lots of ambitious young people who, growing up in this burgeoning "Information Age," want to be part of and take advantage of the opportunities the "Information Age" presents. But, few of them think of going to library school!
Bill Miller referred to the massive disinterest on the part of the profession to the ideas put forward by the National Librarians Association. It seems to me that librarians are fiercely professional in their own institutions but without much professional interest in training for the profession. This is, of course, only my opinion - with which many may disagree. But, is it not the case that many of us do not think much of our library school training. Instinctively we feel that our on-the-job learning has been more significant. If this is so, does it not behoove us to rethink the content and methodology of our training programs so as to improve the product?
Thanks.
One way of insuring that continuing education would be affordable is to do what we do already but with more focus. In many cases there are valuable continuing ed sessions presented at conferences that could have CE credit associated with them. The SLIS at Buffalo did that with NYLA last time to offer credit for a series of presentations with focused content. One would also suspect that if CE were mandated that the professional associations would do more to meet the demand. We are already paying some pretty stout fees for conferences just to fund the cost of meeting venues. It might be viewed by the profession as about time we got something enduring from that cost. There have been discussions in ALA about having a central database for CE credit -- it is not a hard thing to do, but there has to be more of a demand before it will become a priority.
These systems are expensive to set up and administer, and do suffer fr both inflexibility resulting from such administration, as well as tendency to go out of date.
If the practical utility of the certificate is to establish a pecking order of skills and experience only within the profession, then one has to ask whether it's worth the bother, i.e., for the purposes needed, is the certificate significantly more useful than just a detailed resume?
In the computing business, there was a great flurry of activity in the '70s to establish what became known as the certificate in data processing, or CDP. People went around for a while with CDP on their business cards. In the '90s, with data processing having essentially evaporated as it was practiced in the '70s and early '80s, a CDP raises more suspicions about competency than it answers.
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IMHO this is the first sensible thing about certification that has appeared here. Bravo, Peter! Certification is to do with semi-professionals and technical skills. Of course, if that's how librarians see themselves, then why do they fuss so much about "professionalism?" Doctors and lawyers and MBAs don't concern themselves with "certification" but nurses and accountants do, I believe.
It seems to work for a lot of other occupations and professions; could we get comments from people who are more familiar with the above, and similar?
The major downside I see is that few people in the community really care how competent information workers are, so there would be little point to the trouble and expense -- no one would pay more to a certified librarian, but would eventually require certification for new hires. The other major downside is that certification can become credentialism: the latter is what many people accuse the schools of education and teachers' unions of doing: competence is ignored, while holding paper credentials is emphasized.
Will certification improve that provision? Frankly, if I had to concern myself with taking some sort of "standardized" certification test on a perhaps yearly basis, I wouldn't be able to concentrate on the reason I am a librarian -- to provide access to information, or the actual information itself, that my customers need to successfully complete or further their research.
If certification and/or continuing education become requirements for some sort of professional "labelling", will the companies/organizations/institutions for whom we work provide the "away" time and training $$$ for those requirements? I think not, for the most part simply because today's budget's will not stretch that far anymore. Also, most libraries/information centers (whatever your place is called) usually don't have adequate staff to cover missing bodies for extended periods. It's hard enough to attend even one professional conference a year, much less multiple "certification classes."
By the way, the Medical Library Association has been running a certification program for several years...
1. Why certification?
I think the issue of certification continues to come up because so many of us feel a need to do something to ensure that librarians as a group evolve. It's a great indication of our professionalism -- even if we decide not to do it!
2. P. Graham's comments
Peter is right in saying that most of our customers won't care whether the librarian behind the desk (or in the corner of the monitor) is certified, but I can see the potential in certification. It would result in the customer knowing they got better library service over time because the professionals were better prepared...
On the other hand, CWRU is currently looking "for a few good professionals" to work in a heavily networked environment. I am very optimistic about the newer professionals I am meeting during this process. If these librarians are representative of the librarians we'll be seeing from now on -- I think the issue of certification will lessen.
3. Professional Development
"It's everyone's responsibility." That's a slogan CAUSE put on many things last fall at their national conference. P. Mathews made some good points about the cost of CE. I have no magic answers for this, but I know that it's the responsibility of the individual, their supervisor, the "library" , and the "institution". I put library and institution in quotes because we treat them like they are entities -- they are people. Each of us needs to do our part. IMHO paying for association dues is a start for the individual, but just a start. I know it's easier to support a professional who is taking their own initiative and funds. "When I was a new professional in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I paid for at least 75% of my travel to get to ALA etc..." (and I walked to work in snow -- uphill -- both ways).
4. Bottom line
I am confident that librarians will rise to the occasion, hence the push for certification will go away. We are still one of the most dedicated groups of people I know. We are organized. We are "doers."
I see no need to limit such opportunities to "what librarians need to know", as if that is some kind of magical formula. All library employees need to expand their knowledge in: people handling skills, in safety and security concerns; in appropriate behavior; in dealing with difficult patrons; in selection tools for multimedia formats; in learning skills; in instructional methods; in employee evaluation and development; in team-building.
If we believe in continuous learning, how can we not formalize such opportunities and expect minimal participation from every employee?
However, there should be some mechanism for identifying core competencies for various kinds of librarians as we go through the rapid changes we face in the next several years. Individuals will find it helpful to know what experts in their specialty feel are the skills and knowledge areas they should be "up" on and employers will want to know what they are getting in a standardized kind of way. We need to invent some flexible "truth in packaging" plan for librarians.
In practice, the library schools and private educational providers would benefit. Certification would require an immediate expansion of their opportunities to provide the education mandated. The bureaucracy would expand to maintain files of coursework taken, and to provide the certificates. Those who would have been active in learning anyway will continue to seek new knowledge. Those who were not interested will show up for the xx hours of annual training/education (whether it relates to their needs or not) and learn little if anything. For all, the reporting will be an additional burden, and of course to cover the costs of the record keeping, etc. there will be an annual certification fee.
I much prefer the model that the library profession has followed up until now -- self-education along with educational opportunities offered to those who need and/or desire new knowledge.
I'm just completing a degree I'd desired to have for a very long time -- a Masters of Library Science and Information Management. I feel certification may lessen the worth of this long struggle. Going back to school and fulfilling the requirements is always a struggle, though it is often a pleasant experience. More has been taught in school than certification attainment can give. Transformation of ideas -- and logical thinking to back the change - has occurred. Some or MOST of this has been totally independent of class work, just tangents motivated by coursework. It isn't measured or noticed by others. Perhaps CERTIFICATION here is becoming, keeping a degreed person current. But we'll never know everything.
My opinion is: let each institution regulate the value of nondegreed people INDIVIDUALLY, or whether an individual is keeping up with the job required, but keep the real measurement of a librarian the confirmation of a Master's of Library Science and Information Management degree. (And include M.L.S. with each degreed individual's name as part of their identity. C.P.A. or M.D. has meaning and is always included.) Including these three letters can allow the patrons to judge not only the product and feeling of the service, but the educational status.
In settling for less, something is lost.
The courses required to attain an M.L.S. need to be available, as Emporia State University of Kansas will help each area of the world do, by bringing in their week-end intensive program. It takes nearly three years, but is worth the investment. Not perfect. I have some opinions on improving their process, but nothing is perfect in this life and they are agreeable to change.
But I have great confidence in myself from my study through their coursework - and that is the real measurement of any endeavor.
Certification seems less than attainment of a degree. Why settle for less? When something less is settled on, you've negated the efforts of those who have attained the harder / higher goal.
It is impractical to merely declare certification necessary without providing support for the education process necessary for the certification. Employers and governments must recognize (or be forced to recognize) the certification scenario and the education that is required. If certification exists but is not backed up by force of law or regulation, then the certification likely will be ignored by employers and financial support for the necessary certification will be ignored as well.
Also, if we are to certify what a "librarian" is, we will also need to certify what a "library" is as well. I believe this is at the heart of our profession's debate about the image of librarians. How is the public to understand what a "librarian" is when "library" has so many meanings?
For example, I am a public library director with an ALA-accredited MILS degree. Our library is in rural Upper Michigan. Many of the other public libraries in rural Michigan are small. Some are no more than a tiny room in the corner of a township hall and are staffed by a single part-time individual who has no more than a high school diploma. The collection in some these libraries is usually small, old, and battered. Yet, in our state this type of entity is considered a "public library" just as much as our larger library, or even Detroit Public! The person who works in the tiny "public library" is allowed to be called a "librarian", just as much as I, or the director of DPL is.
I'm not trying to be snooty about this, but the tiny, ill-equipped "public libraries" do not, and cannot provide the same services to their public as bigger libraries can. The high school diploma "librarian" at that tiny library, (as nice and well-intentioned as they may be), cannot provide the same level of service as someone with more library education.
The Michigan Library Association had two task force reports, (one on recruitment and retention and another on library funding), that touched on this issue. One even went so far as to suggest that the tiny "libraries" be called something else like "reading centers". That suggestion in particular was met with howls of disapproval from some members, especially those from the rural areas.
I believe that those reports were on the right track. We must remove ourselves from the warm fuzzy images of the old-timey "libraries" of the past and look at what resources and services our patrons want and need. We need trained, dynamic individuals to staff the real "libraries" of today and tomorrow.
HOWEVER those "librarians" and "libraries" must be clearly defined AND supported by funding and by law.
I have been a certified medical librarian since entering the profession in 1977. The certification is from the Medical Library Association (MLA). A MLA certification program has been in place since 1948, and it has changed greatly over the years, particularly since 1977. For example, when I first entered the profession certification meant verification that I had a Masters degree and that I took certain courses in medical librarianship (at U Michigan three such courses were available and I took hem all, and the 'old' rival program at Case Western Reserve may have had one or two more courses). MLA went through the testing phase, but that was dropped in favor of the new program a few years ago. If certified medical librarians met the basics of the new criteria, they were grandfathered into the new program. (I am recalling this history from memory so some information may be distorted).
Currently the 'certification' program is the Academy of Health Information Professionals. There are various degrees of membership (Associate, Member, Senior Member, Distinguished Member). The Academy is "a professional development and career recognition program of the Medical Library Association, which certifies librarians on the basis of professional achievements."
The program has received a fair amount of criticism, mostly from MLA members who are not Academy members. The criticism has been reported here in the discussion: it is costly to administer (supported by Academy registration fees); CE programs can be costly to individuals (MLA provides a long-standing and extensive CE program at its annual meetings and at its chapter meetings; local programs can obtain CE credit when application is made in advance); it does not necessarily provide a return in a salary increase (though I think more and more directors are trying to use Academy activities as indication of staff professional service worthy of either tenure or merit increases);and, it is a professional recognition and carries no legal standing.
One criticism unique to MLA was some stern comments from hospital librarians when the certification program changed to the Academy membership. Many professionals in the hospital environment must be certified to attain certain positions. Hospital librarians wanted to have their certification match those of other professionals; they wanted recognition for being a professional as well. (It is important to remember that the status of hospital librarians has been compromised by the poor image of the library professional in our society. Often hospital libraries were the jurisdiction of medical secretaries or medical records 'librarians'. Their task was to protect the doctors' books -- no service, no active collection building, no information service, no professionalism. 'Anybody can be a librarian' mentality has been fought over the years by dedicated, educated hospital librarians who have managed to change the mentality to one of recognition of the librarians' value to health care. Over the years the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations have reiterated the value of the hospital librarian by making a library requirement (or some form of it) part of their accreditation standards). Since the Academy started, hospital librarians have recognized its value and have used it to promote their commitment to professionalism via continuing education, though admittedly, some still do criticize the Academy as not meeting their needs and appearing at times to be elitist. Again, to emphasize what was discussed already, the health care professions all demonstrate a commitment to life-long learning. That is what certification means to them. Again, a doctor who is Board certified in his/her specialty, definitely offers more to a patient than one who does not. A nurse in a certified specialty offers more in terms of knowledge and skill than one who does not hold that certification.
Why am I certified? Because it is there -- it was and is a program that I can use for myself as a gauge for my development as a professional. This has been a personal choice though I highly recommend it to young professionals who take their career seriously. Even if you oppose the concept, professionals can use the Academy principles as a guide for building their career.
The Academy recognizes a range of professional activities, CE being only one. Teaching, taking courses, publishing and writing, committee work, speeches and presentations, software development, etc. all count toward Academy recognition.v In response to some of the criticism of the certification concept, particularly:
"For what it's worth, I think certification is wrong-headed and pointless. Our patrons want help from whoever they can get it from, and I can't imagine their inquiring at a ref. desk if the person there is certified. And what if they're not? Do we then not let the para-prof tell the patron where the Encyclopaedia Brittanica is?"
This point is a bit too narrow for me. Certification is for professionals (a point, raised in a recent posting, a student misunderstood as something that replaces a Master degree). It recognizes that something more has been attained by the individual -- more knowledge, more skill -- beyond the basic credential, which as I recall from reading ALA literature, is still a Master degree from an accredited (certified?) program. Certification means that some organization with standing recognizes the additional effort a professional makes to their education. If you do the same effort as I and make the same commitment as I and choose NOT to gain recognition for your effort, that is your choice. Many of my friends in MLA think I'm a bit foolish for paying too much attention (and money) to certification. We attend the same programs and can get the same CE credit; we are equally good, committed professionals. I choose to use the Academy recognition as something good for me. I do not impose it on others nor would I , but when the time comes to justify a staff merit increase based on Academy status, I will do so.
I do not think of Academy recognition as elitist. It's recognition; individuals put their own value on it. I do use the initials A.H.I.P. on my business card, along with A.M.L.S. (the Michigan tradition of designating a MICHIGAN library science degree -- and I make DAMN sure people know I have this degree. Even in academia, users do NOT know you have to have a Master degree to meet MINIMUM qualifications for library practice. So I remind them in my own way. Besides, we are in the education business, and the degree is what you get for your education; and I realize the issue of whether anything is learned is still a question. Staff criticize me for using the initials; they say that only Ph.D.s and MDs should be designated, and anything else is superficial, so I disagree with them). And I did make it a point to tell my boss about my Academy membership.
Whether certification is good or bad for the association is the heart of the question here. (The consensus seems to be that continuing education is good and a natural mark of a committed professional). By discussing whether members believe in a certification helps verify whether or not they will support a PROGRAM. I think we should be discussing whether this is a good policy for ALA or its divisions to develop as a membership program. Can the program be self-supporting? Will the program make a positive statement to users? Is the program good for the membership?
I hope the above adds to the discussion and apologies to those who think this is too long-winded.
As incoming president of ACRL, I established a task force to look at certification of librarians and information professionals; this task force is chaired by Deborah Leather, and will be having an open hearing next Saturday, June 24, in Chicago at the ALA annual conference. Please go and voice your opinion; the meeting is from 8:30 to 11 a.m., at the McCormick Convention Center, room E252.
The discussion of the medical librarians' certification, or academy, structure reflected many of the issues that I find to be persuasive in arguing for some kind of certification structure.
I believe that librarianship is one of the only professions without a mechanism that conveys to its members what they are accountable for, and also communicates to the public what they can expect from a member of the profession. The improving quality of library school graduates is great, but why not link this to a system that urges members of the profession to either contribute to the profession's knowledge, or to continue their learning process?
The argument that our salaries are so low that we don't warrant certification seems to me a red herring. I would hope that a certification structure that communicates adequately to the rest of the world what a librarian needs to know in order to accomplish his or her job properly would ultimately result in higher salaries, just as has happened with the nursing profession.
I think that we need to recognize ourselves as professionals with all the accouterments - and one of these is a set of expectations of knowledge and performance. Given our background, this can't be mandatory, I think, but a voluntary system would, I believe, be most appropriate for an information-related profession in an information age.
For one thing, I really have trouble defining what I have in common with a school librarian except at a very narrow level. Public librarians and special librarians have different experiences and requirements.
For another thing, the systems librarians and the reader service librarians seem to me to have very different requirements, knowledge, expectations, and experiences.
There are obviously more examples. And obviously we have some elements in common. But these tend to be at the general level, in terms of ethics and expressed in rhetoric (and good rhetoric, e.g. Sue's); but if the language gets very precise -- that is, if it is to be of any use -- it will be very difficult to build in such a way that it covers all of our needs and experiences.
So in a cost-effectiveness sense alone I urge that we keep on working on our committees for government information dissemination, for NIDR, for freedom to read, for literacy and for shared collection development -- it will take a lot of committees diverting us from real work to come up with certification requirements.
8:30 am - 11:00 a.m
WHAT: Hearing on certification for professional librarians and information specialists
SPONSOR: ACRL Task Force on Certification for Professional Librarians and Information Specialists
WHERE: McCormick Place Complex, East Building, E-252
The American Library Association has been dealing with the issue of certification for about two decades in one division or another and even through an ALA committee, but there still has been no action taken. Why is this? Is this an issue that has no real support by the professionals or is it a problem of how to get it administratively off the ground? Is now the time when the time wasn't right before?
Come to the hearing and learn the pros and cons of certification and then help with the task force deliberations on this issue. YOUR IDEAS AND OPINIONS WILL BE VERY IMPORTANT TO OUR PROCESS. After this hearing session, the task force will make its recommendations to the ACRL Board. The members of the task force hope you can take time to work on this very controversial but important topic.
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