Redhaired Future Librarian

It is What You Make it

A recurring theme I have been noticing lately is people complaining that library school is not intellectually rigorous enough. (I’ve also seen assumptions that distance education does not require teachers, but I’m going to dismiss that one without comment.)

In a sense, library school is what you make it. It is entirely possible to sail through library school without really engaging your brain, especially if you’re bright (which I think aspiring librarians tend to be.) At the same time, though, there are meatier things to think about. You can get meta and think about library education itself. You can look at libraries through the lenses of various philosophers and thinkers (Foucault and Gramsci being two that are popular at my school.) You can look at the intellectual foundations and assumptions of librarianship. You can examine how humans seek information and how they react when they find it. There are a lot of very interesting things to look at.

Is it as rigorous as physics? No. Anthropology? No. (But libraries can be examined through an anthropological lens.)

I’ve seen library school blamed for a student’s own lack of motivation. You don’t have to stop learning as soon as you leave a classroom. There is no law that says you are not allowed to learn more about, say, MARC Bibliographic Standards, if your cataloging teacher doesn’t explore them in depth (if you were lucky enough to take cataloging.) I’m hardly a model student (I have a lot of bad habits), but one thing I do is seek out more challenges. I look for the books my professors have written. When we get a chapter in a course pack, I’ll seek out the book itself (if I find it interesting.) I try to write papers and reviews that will be useful to me or other librarians later, rather than just trying to get through the assignment. One of my professors suggests that we strive to make our papers of high enough quality that they could be published. It’s a good standard.

Library school students get what they put in. If you’re currently in library school and you don’t feel like it’s intellectually rigorous enough, why not seek out the harder instructors? I’m sure every library school has at least one. (Mine has several, and it is worth it to take classes from them.) Start a journal discussion group and look at current research in the field. You might find it wanting– so start thinking about what you can do to remedy that. Start reading philosophy, ethnography, historiography and see what you can apply to librarianship. Find an intellectual mentor or intellectual peers and band together in your geekery.

The people who feel unchallenged by library school can be the key for intellectual growth in the profession.