Redhaired Librarian

IMLS Grant

My school just received a new grant to fund the education of future library school faculty. The responses I’ve seen so far are… not exactly a wakeup call… but further signs of a rift between practitioners and academics. I noticed the same rift at the ALA session on teaching cataloging to school librarians.

Librarianship has more going on than what appears on the surface. There are a lot of fascinating questions that can be answered and are being answered by current LIS researchers. It’s true that some research can be found lacking, but the solution to that is to recruit better potential researchers, not to denigrate our profession. Not to decide that library school is just vo-tech and there’s nothing more to learn about the field. It will be inevitable that some people will graduate library school feeling that they haven’t learned anything. There will be others who feel like they just bought a piece of paper that expands their career horizons. That’s inevitable in any field. But we don’t all have to have that attitude.

I know that I need to shore myself up to face contempt from both practicing librarians and from other academics who look down at librarianship much the same way some of our own practitioners do. It’s important to look at these questions, though. If we don’t see ourselves as a profession, with value, worth studying, how on earth can we expect others to value us?