BONNIE POSTLETHWAITE: Well, it looks like the diehards are still here. Thank you. I
know many people had to catch flights out. I'm Bonnie Postlethwaite. I'm the dean of
libraries at the University of Kansas City and I'd like to welcome you to Kansas City.
I hope it's enough to entice you back. It's a great city. I would also like to thank IMLS
for sponsoring this. I think this has been a great discussion that's going to accumulate
into a wonderful discussion here at this last session. Today we're focusing on aligning
curriculum with the needs of today's libraries and library users, with an eye on how IMLS
can prioritize and target their funding towards building a strong profession with a longterm
future. So how do we prepare new professionals to be better prepared for today's needs? What
is the current state of the profession? What's happening? What's working? What are the gaps
and opportunities. How do these things translate into actionable funding priorities for IMLS
grant programs. And that's what we hope to address this afternoon, and I'm sure that
you all have ideas that you can contribute once we've had our four panelists give a brief
perspective of their own on these topics. So with us today, we have David Lankes, who's
a professor, School of Information Studies at Syracuse. Mary Stansbury, who's associate
professor, Library and Information Science at University of Denver. She's also the chair
of the ALA committee on accreditation. Mark Puente is the director of Diversity and Leadership
Programs at the Association of Research Libraries, and Siobhan Reardon is the president and director
of the Free Library of Philadelphia and we're going to go in that order, so take it away,
David. >> DAVID LANKES: We've also agreed that we're
not going to use PowerPoint and we're not going to get up. So there.
[Laughter] actually, I would like to reward you for staying, and online. I would like
to reward you by committing a little suicide before you, I'm going to take on the national
archivist and call him to task. At this gathering for the national platform and chaired platform
two weeks ago in some of his comments, he didn't spare too many words for information
and library science programs, actually library museum and archive sciences, and while he
did acknowledge that there may be some pockets of expertise and excellence, which I'm sure
he was talking about us. >> Yes.
>> DAVID LANKES: He said that in essence, we, as a people preparing the next generation
of library science, weren't coming from the the folks we were sending weren't giving him
the skills they needed, that the folks he needed to hire weren't coming from our professional
programs, that libraries, archives and museum programs, these folks didn't comingle. They
didn't necessarily have the skills, of which he mentioned specifically one, which was that
he needed people who could be nice. >> I don't know how you teach that.
>> DAVID LANKES: I don't know what he's talking about. Being nice. Anyway, but the big thing
that he raised, and actually had a really interesting online discussion, where I'd like
to begin my comments today, is he said that when he talked to library science programs
and others, but library science programs are what he mentioned, that he said that we consider
our students, our customers, and, in fact, that that was wrong, that he was our customers,
and by inference, institutions of libraries, museums and archives are the customers of
our programs. So that can be raised really into an interesting question. So before I
jump in to that question, I do want to, however, bring back something that Ken Haycock once
said in a 2004 panel where we were talking about librarian information instruction, Ken
went to great pains to remind us all that it is, in fact the profession that credits
our programs, that you folk, and him, set the criteria by which we are evaluated and
assessed, and we take that very seriously. This isn't something that we just sort of
run away on and go wee! Let's try this today! But we'll come back to that in a moment.
Really, I want to take on this notion that libraries are our customers. And the first
is I want to take issue with the word "Customer." Because I don't like that word in libraries
in general. I think that we have a much more entangled, much more interesting and much
more potentially powerful relationship with those that we serve, and that those that we
are a part of. I don't believe that our communities are our customers. I believe that we are our
communities. And just as when I talk about libraries and when I talk about library science
professors and when I talk about library science students, I don't look at them as separate
categories. I look at them as part of a profession. For example, when a new student graduates
from Syracuse University, they in essence inherit some of the value and prestige that
comes with it. In essence, they're treading on our good name to help them in their field,
but five years, ten years later, it is exactly the opposite, where we are trading on their
skills as alumni and where their positions are and how they've succeeded and the stories
that we can tell. That kind of intricate relationship between alumni and school, higher, potential
higher, all of that is much more complex than simply customers and consumers. Just as I
would hope that in our libraries, they're not just this is why I hate the word "User,"
you know, I don't think any librarian stands up and celebrates the fact that they have
been used. [Laughter]
And I'm hoping not too many people walk around going, boy, I used them good today. This idea
that they are our members, they're part of us. They're our neighbors, they're our they
are part of us. So that's the first. But the second is this challenge of who is the customer.
I think the idea that the museums and libraries and archives, and in our case the libraries,
are our customers come from a gild mentality that talks about the idea that we are preparing
spare parts for a profession and when the reference library dies, we wheel out the reference
librarian and wheel in a new one, and while there's been great accusations between the
library science schools that we're not preparing the people you need, let me reverse this for
a moment and say you guys are not keeping up your end of the bargain and hiring the
people that we produce. That's what it takes for you guys to be the customer as a hundred
percent of our product and it doesn't happen and it's not your fault, but what this is
meant is that what's happened is we looked for other markets where our students can find
places, and, in fact, in the 1970s, as early as the 1970s, my not my dean, but a former
dean of my school named Bob Taylor, renamed us from the school of library sciences to
the school of information studies and said hey, these same skills. How we implement this
and information retrieval and technology and patternization and user behavior and such
can be used in other industries. Why should we just be producing these folks, for one,
when we can take this great thing and strengthen intelligence, banking, computing, all these
other industries, and I would argue that what's happened in the years since then is that we've
seen a massive growth in other industries looking for the tasks that our field has produced,
and we've seen library science programs become part of and eventually smaller and smaller
part of information studies programs, because we see a larger market elsewhere. And we've
kept library science programs dedicated and devoted to a single industry, and what that
is meant is the gradual migration of different points of view into these different camps.
So on the library side we see services essential. We see customer service and being nice as
essential. We see information organization as essential. And in information we see large
scale data. We see technology. We see user implementation. We see the idea of return
on investment as essential. And yet we know, by me just combing through that list, yes,
they're all essential, but they have begun to migrate out. People who seek to serve others
with their values of librarianship need technology and need understanding. People who seek to
improve banking need values. Let's be really honest, people who serve banking need values
[in a louder voice]. And by segmenting these out and saying no, you go into the library
and you do this, we are causing a service and a rift within our profession that is not
about who does cataloguing and what we call our profession, but is very much about what
we seek to do so here's my one line and then I will shut up, that I do not envy what IMLS
has to decide in the near future, which is, are you going to continue to support libraries,
or are you going to begin to support librarians. Those librarians taking our values and taking
our ideas, yes, into our institutions and into our communities but also into our banks
and our nonprofit organizations and our blood banks and all these things. I did a quick
this is my piece of data and then I'll shut up. This is our attendance list. I did a count.
I got roughly 30 out of 56 of you do not work in libraries. You work in library schools,
you work in library associations, you work in notforprofit organizations. I think you
guys count, and I think you're important in our education, even though you may not be
seen, or Dave Ferrier doesn't see you as our customers. I think he and I would agree on
a lot of these things, but I just like to pick on him, so
>> Well, as the person earlier today who regretted coming after Anne Craig, I'm coming after
David Lankes, but I would like to talk a little bit about how our program at the University
of Denver has tried to align what we do in terms of the learning experience we create
and nurture for our students, and what the profession has told us it would like to have,
as well as say a little bit about accreditation, which I appreciate David kind of getting that
ball rolling. So very different hats here. But a little
bit about DULIS. And I want to thank IMLS for its amazing support of our program over
the years. We've had some great funding for our early childhood librarianship program
in which we combine course work in LIS with course work in child family and school psychology,
including infant development, language acquisition, children with special needs, as well as we
were partners with the Denver public library on their leaders fellowships which brought
people into the program and then out into the community with an MLS who can speak Vietnamese,
who are Vietnamese, Russian and Spanish so we've really benefitted from that amazing
partnership we have with the institutions in the Denver the Rocky Mountain West, as
well as Web wise and spell and public libraries, we're very, very grateful for that.
Our program is a small program. In fact, some of you might remember when it went away in
the '80s, and it came back in the late mid to late '90s. And so we're very small, and
we're facetoface only, which puts us in a pretty unique place. Not many programs are
face to face only anymore, but what that allows us to do is a couple of things I think that
really help our students become ready for the profession. And one of those things is
that each student in our program has a professional mentor, and just as a measure of how great
the support is in the region, we have more mentor volunteers than we have students. So
we've been very, very fortunate with that support. So each student gets to connect with
the mentor professional really from the day they start the program. We also have a review
process. Annually each student gets reviewed not only for academic performance, but for
disposition, such as leadership, in a personal communication, those sorts of things, so we're
able to really watch our students develop as professionals and if we see a need for
helping them think about leadership in a way that doesn't mean president of the student
chapter of ALA, we, as faculty, are responsible for making that happen.
I mentioned the outstanding, energetic practitioners. We're also in a college of education, which,
for so many years has been viewed by ILS education as a disadvantage, but for us it's a huge
advantage mainly because the child family and school psyche programs in that college,
our partner program in our department is research methods and statistics, and we're actually
working with them to develop a post master certificate and assessment and evaluation,
so that's kind of hitting a button that we mentioned earlier.
I think, too, that because we're small, because our college is small, University of Denver
is not that large, we have to look at things from an interdisciplinary perspective, which
matches well with the problems that practitioners have. There's not a library science problem
hardly ever that's just pure library science. And just as another example of what we're
trying to do based on feedback from our stakeholders, our employers, our students, our alums is
beginning in the fall, some funding from our dean of the college of education and the dean
of university libraries, we're piloting what we're calling a clinical model, and because
we have the child family and school psyche folks and the counseling psyche folks, we
have some really good templates for a clinical model for professional education. And we're
doing this, first in the university libraries at DU, and what we're doing is we're creating
learning outcomes that relate to the course work that the students will be in the classroom,
but then they'll be for we're on a quarter system, for three quarters, they'll be in
the university library with specific, specific experiences that are connected back to the
classroom content. So we have great, you know, cooperation from the university libraries,
we're developing these learning outcomes together, and what that allows us to do is look at how
students develop their expertise, as well as their professional demeanor and their professional
skills and we'd be able to at any point in time say you know what, to a particular student,
you can't wear cutoffs to work, that kind of thing, which, unfortunately, does happen,
especially in Colorado. So that is very exciting to us. We are piloting it. We're going to
see how it goes. But, clinical models take an enormous commitment on the part of the
profession. It takes a lot of time, as most of you probably know, to supervise a practicum
student. That's one level of involvement with that student's learning experience. When we
bump it up to a clinical model there's a whole lot more of your time that we would need to
make that work, so we'll see how that goes. But we also believe that that's what we need.
For several reasons. Certainly, again, as we hear from you all, that our students, graduates
in a general sense aren't ready for the profession, for work, I should say, which is different.
And then we're also and this is across LIS programs, our students are getting younger
and younger and younger. I mean, I'm waiting for, you know, a 12yearold to show up not
really in the classroom, but and because of that, they have very little context in terms
of working anywhere other than maybe in an hourly position somewhere, and then no context
related to libraries. LIS faculty, we're going to have to step it
up. We can't lean back on the skills I acquired as a school librarian many years ago in Plano,
Texas. So we're going to have to step it up so that we can meet the expectations of our
practitioner partners. And then I want to say, I have a minute left, a little bit about
accreditation. The accreditation is about program quality. Right now, in our field and
specifically through the American library association accreditation is the only professional
ride credential we have, and that's why I think in part accreditation is looked to to
solve so many problems, but it's about academic program quality. Certainly it responds to
and reflects what the profession says are important things to learn, the values, the
big ideas, but accreditation is not about saying what you should want from our graduates.
It is responding to what the profession tells us. A librarian knees to know, no, there's
not a lot of agreement. If you look back at the core competences, which is, we have all
these competency statements that really don't give us a whole lot of direction about what
y'all need so I wanted to mention that. Yes. Sorry. That is that one is, yeah, hot button
issue there. In addition, we have the differentiation issues,
and my time is up there, but, thank you. [Applause]
>> MARK PUENTE: So thank you. Thank you for the invitation to be here. In high school,
I was big in drama, but speaking is my worst category so I try to script out everything
I say, so please bear with me. I'll try to be emphatic here, but I won't be as emphatic
as David. My comments here reflect what I see and what many in the research library
see as the current And then also based on a little bit of evidence,
which is having I think my finger on the pulse of the position descriptions that are being
deposited to our academic library, research library and database that ARL hosts.
I'm also going to delineate a little bit here between the skills side and the competency
side. I'll explain it a little bit more what I mean, but I think there may be some taxonomy
issues here but I'll try to explain what I mean. But from the skills side, in terms of
function, and expertise, I think a lot of the sort of titles and roles that I'm about
to enumerate here are going to sound familiar to everybody in this room, even to public
and school libraries, so areas around data and digital curation. GIS specialists, right?
Digital humanists. People engaged in assessment, user experience, but also, in our community,
with a an emphasis on alternative metrics, highly, highly important. People who are expert
in flipped teaching pedagogies and instructional technology. These are the people that we're
recruiting into these researchintensive environments. People with that are able to support research
focus that is kind of R & D maker spaces. We've had a lot of conversations about that
today, those efforts today. Digital storytelling also as a pedagogy. Those with linguistic
tools, we're hiring many, many digital archivists into our community. People who are familiar
with postcustodial archives models, which puts the sort of curation role at the creator
level, can talk more about that if anybody has questions. People who know a lot about
open educational resources, and, of course, open access, and open data. So people who
have an in depth understanding of the scholarly communication ecosystem. So these are the
types of people that are really getting jobs these days.
I also reported back in March at Columbia University library symposium about the growing
trend, and again, I'm just the messenger here, within ARL libraries, research intensive organizations
to hire outside of the traditional MLIS pipeline. That is a reality. In fact, over the last
five years, in our librarian database at ARL, we've seen really a marked increase in the
number of positions that are being posted that have either the MLIS is not even mentioned,
these are professional level positions that require no MLIS or don't even have the MLIS
as a preferred qualification. So that's a trend, definitely.
For some of those roles, I mean, I think, you know, it's possibly very predictable in
research libraries. Some of those are in the technology side, such as programmers, systems,
analysts and other functional specialties, and some others such as HR specialists and
marketing analysts. That's another trend in research libraries.
But also, some of those position descriptions that are absent of that MLIS requirement are
for deans and directors for collections analysts and things like this. So who knows where we're
headed with that. And also, with respect to those instances
where recruiting people into our organizations that have a high level of domain expertise
or subjects expertise, particularly hiring Ph.Ds that have no traditional library training.
So, you know, what is our role in CD, PD, and in traditional LIS pipeline to prepare
and assimilate those people into our community. So let's see, so the competency side of it
I'm running out of time, there's also a lot of talk in our community, and I bet in other
sectors as well, about those competencies, and here I'm referring to mindsets, right,
dispositions, such as change readiness, right? Collaborative mind sets, entrepreneurial or
risktaking mind sets, cultural competencies, so all of these things that will keep the
our communities engaged, and that will respond to the current needs of our community.
So again, in the brief time that I have, I want to switch just a little bit to talking
on the diversity side because I think also, critically, in LIS programs, and in continuing
education and professional development, we have to begin having conversation, deeper
conversations and educating people and informing people about the value that diversity and
inclusion bring to our profession. It is absolutely critical. It is critical for relevance. And
by the way, I mean diversity in its broadest sense. Not only racial and ethnic diversity,
but religious diversity, sexual orientation, age, demographic diversity, all of those components
and those elements of the human experience and the human conditions. So it's a relevance
issue. It's been mentioned many times today that we know from research that libraries
and archives are seen as more inviting. When people see themselves, their customers, their
patrons, whatever that word is, see themselves represented in their collections, in the professional
staff, in their programming, we know this, right, and there is and there's increasing
evidence that those that sort of inclusivity, it actually adds to student success and advances
the teaching and learning missions of these organizations.
It's also a matter of organizational excellence. There's abundant scientific evidence that
having a diverse work force and diverse collections improves organizational performance and I
frequently, as I give these talks, cite the work from Dr. Scott Paige. I hope you know
some of him at the University of Michigan, who has done extensive research about the
abilities of groups to make decisions and to solve complex problems, and what he has
found in his research is that the more deep diversity that is represented in these groups,
the better they are at complex problemsolving and decision making. I could, you know, talk
to my voice runs out on that topic. And lastly, I want to nod to my colleague
over there, who I think was the first person today to remember the issue to mention the
issue of social justice, right, sorry we don't have time to dive into this too deeply, but
the persistent problem of low minority representation in the library and archives workforce, and
museums, I might say, is a product of traditional systems that were not created to advance the
to advance people from historically or from historically underrepresented or marginalized
communities. That's just the issue. There are systemic barriers to them doing many things,
including entering our workforce. So I have I'll refer to maybe a couple of recent publications
maybe a little bit later if we have time, one from Ithaca S & R, about educating
the research library workforce and the publication that came out of the University of Maryland
at their high school that's doing some deep assessment about workforce needs and development
of curriculum around MLIS. [Applause]
>> SIOBHAN REARDON: So good afternoon. Thank you for having me. I'm Siobhan Reardon, and
I'm going to come at this a little bit differently, and I'm going to talk to you all about the
customers we serve, because it's the customers we serve that add a tremendous amount of complexity
for us telling library schools what it is we need because often it's really difficult
for us to actually say, what do we need. So how do you address a profession that is
a cradle to grave in service. How do you address a profession that crosses economic spectrum
from poor to absolute wealth? And we have to really think about those people who are
in our spaces. There are people in our spaces that really like to be there and want to be
there, and there are people in our spaces that don't want to have to be there. Little
kids whose parent has told them to go there because that's a safe place and that's where
you have to stay until I come pick you up, or the young man or young woman that's in
our space is because they, as part of their adjudication process, have to come in and
have a place to work. We need to understand that the people in our
spaces need actually the kind of spaces that are welcoming and much more accessible. We
heard a lot about that from Ruth. We have a lot of staff that are very strong
on book knowledge, yet have very little perspective on community engagement. And what does that
mean? We've had to hire social workers and as we've been hearing time and time again,
that the people in our spaces are very complex individuals, and when we think about services
to people with disabilities, we have a tremendous amount of homelessness, particularly in our
center city locations, and our staff are just simply not equipped to do that. You didn't
come out of library school to worry about the homeless person in your space or the emotionally
challenged person in your space, yet they're there and they have a right to be there, and
so what do we have to do in order to build the capacity of our staff to still do the
right kind of work when it comes to information services. But know that there's a very complex
group of individuals in this space. So we have hired social workers to add to the sort
of totality of the people that are part of our employment base, and I'm telling you,
the social workers will come out and say to us, we spend more time coaching the staff
than we do moving the homeless individuals in to services. And so and that's okay, and
that's why they're there. More than 50% of our school children have, by the time they
get to fourth grade, can't read at a fourth grade level, and so that adds another complexity
around the relationship between the school district and the Free Library of Philadelphia,
and particular, there's a larger conversation going around called the Campaign For Grade
Level Reading in 157 cities across this nation have a campaign for grade level reading as
part of this work and the Free Library Philadelphia is now the backbone agency for this work actually
not here, but in Philadelphia, and what that means is that we're leading a partnership,
we're leading a collaboration of over 50 partners to begin to understand what is it going to
take for us to create a community around the support and build the scaffolding for that
child and that child's family so that by the time they get to fourth grade, they're reading
at a fourth grade level. It's a very complex process, but the library is sitting at the
middle of this, and that's a good place for us to be.
In the poorer parts of the city, we are able to connect with constituents, so let me just
tell you, this is the hot spot conversation. So as you heard from Colin, the Free Library
Philadelphia received a grant from the Knight foundation, and this was the pivot point for
us because what we did was we built technology units in communitybased organizations. And
the reason this is significant is that these were in poorer communities. That was sort
of the criteria for us putting these technology centers there, was that the people who came
and used the services were people who never crossed the transom of a public library. Why?
Because they had the presumption that they needed to be literate in order to come to
a library. Remember a lot of our infrastructure are these big a lot of stairs going into a
temple of knowledge, and so we create this our own problems in this space. And so the
hot spots are meant to create that boots on the ground, deep in community conversation,
and a space and place we never thought possible, and that was the pivot point for us to say
we need to stop waiting for people to come through our doors and we need to barge through
theirs and create the conversation. And then similarly, and I'm forgetting forgive
me for who has the Spell Program but we have a similar Words At Play program, and this
is not librarians that we hired, but we hired local, we call them library coordinators,
and they're people that come from these North Philadelphia or South Philadelphia, Southwest
Philadelphia communities, but they are people who know the community and in order to bring
people into our Words At Play, this is a parent that had to come with a child, we went to
the nail salons, we went to the beauty salons and we went to the barber shops, but it's
people who know these communities that are helping us build the skill sets of our overall
library staff and it's not our librarians who understood, to do that is not a criticism
of our librarians, they are practiced in a very different way. But that speaks to a very
important point is that our librarians don't see themselves as community leaders and they
absolutely are and I really would love the library schools to really take that on as
to really take us from a place where we are a very passive profession to something that
is very forward and very assertive and almost aggressive to the point where we absolutely
are community leaders, and here's why. We have a presence, and we have a practice, and
when you think about information literacy being almost, we're now a second generation
of students coming through with zero information literacy skill sets, we had this conversation
before, it's amazing how many young people are coming out of college and they really
don't know how to dissect information. It's because of all of this lost from the early
years. And so and we spend a lot of time with our staff. I got that. Three minutes. I guess
very passionate about this. Can you tell? But it's really about how you move an old
urban center, a city that has tremendous amount of capacity, and it's about how you think
about our staff are involved, and in one of the most civically engaged city yet don't
know how to give and deliver really good civically engaging programs, that which talk about so
let's talk about the trouble with the school system, let's talk about the issues around
race. Let's talk about the things that are challenging to the cities. We're in the middle
of a mayoral race. Let's have those conversations. We were not the ones that produced the debates.
It was other organizations who used our spaces. And, you know, it's just and I'm just going
to circle it back to say there's a reason we have a conversation around, you know, how
do we how do we stop being all things to all people? We can't. We can't afford it. We're
not good at it, and so let's make let's narrow down the skill sets to say in our strategic
plan, we said we're going to focus on five strategic areas, and the five strategic areas
are children under five, families, people in the workforce development, people with
services to persons with disabilities, and the small businesses and entrepreneur. The
reasons we're doing this is that these are the people who are really exacting the high
levels of our librarian services, and this is where the librarian really needs all of
their skill sets so we're actually raising the librarian to work at a very high level
and bring lots of scaffolding underneath that librarian on the community outreach. But I
really do see the fact that as we reorganized our system I know I'm meandering, but that's
okay. You just have to follow me somehow. But it's but we had to restructure our system
because of the financial distress that we were in. And to understand that we broke our
system down, we're a system of 55 units, into smaller clusters, and what are the biggest
responsibilities of the community, of the cluster leader is to build what we call community
councils, and this community council is made up of police, fire, sanitation, communitybased
organizations, you name it, faithbased organizations, the schools. It is the toughest piece they
can do all the professional development, they're really good, they can do a lot of the base
work around management, but they cannot do this new job of creating community councils.
They do not know how to do it. They are not community organizers, and they are not people
who are traditionally working in partnership capacities and we need to really help figure
that out, too. Did I do it? [Applause]
>> BONNIE POSTLETHWAITE: Great. That was wonderful. So we'll open it up for questions. I think
the mics are floating around. >> So I have two questions, really. The first
one >> Name?
>> I'm sorry. Gail Dickinson, Old Dominion University. The first one is my, as you were
talking about the librarians at library schools produce, my area, of course, is a graduate
associate dean and a college of education is to compare that with classroom teachers
and classroom teachers are evaluated very strictly, have tremendous amount of pressure
on them, but there is more or less, fairly or unfairly, a universal standard of expectations
for what classroom teachers are supposed to do. I mean, there is the good classroom teachers
are this and we can draw, with some variation, the box. Does that exist, my first question,
for librarians. Is there a universal standard by what we should expect of a librarian just
out of library school? The second one is a model that I think was
either Tennessee or Kentucky. They presented at a conference, the State Department of Education
had devised a formula for putting the praise and/or blame of classroom teachers on whether
or not it was how they were prepared, or whether it was the school in which they were teaching.
And the first year out of the preparation, it was 100% the preparation, you know, it's
your fault, it's your great, you did a great job. But the percentage went down from the
preparation, and up from the school in which they worked until at the end of five or ten
years, if a teacher was not performing, the blame went back to 100% the school division
in which they taught. So the librarians then ten years out of library school, it would
not be, in my case, the shame or the praise for UNC Chapel Hill, it would be where I worked
that did not continue to, so could you speak to both of those questions?
>> DAVID LANKES: I have a definition of a universal librarian. I think what's interesting
is in times of great stability, institutional prominence in different fields from education
to library science to medicine, the emphasis of education on the craft is appropriate and
makes sense, and you talk about competencies. In times of great change, particularly change
moving from institutional focusses to personal agency, that is from hospitals to doctors,
from the doctors to patients, from schools to teachers, when we look at changes, then
the larger and we keep saying theory and practice. I think that's the wrong word, because it
gets so much work. The difference between larger, deeper concepts and implementation
of a craft, that focus has to change, and it has to move towards deeper concepts. My
work and others here, and your work, is very much about finding what is fundamental in
a time of change. And what I hear over and over again when I hear, is we need people
with good people skills, but a lot of these dispositions, creativity, life long learning,
things that are not skillsbased. And so I think that there's actually a pretty good
agreement. What I'm amazed by in this room is I stand here and I go, you know, I remember
six years ago when we talked about the communities or collection and people looked at us like
we were just weird people, and I was like yep, of course. Right? That idea that we're
moving together and pushing forward, I think it becomes important. So
>> MARY STANSBURY: Yeah, I'll try to answer part of your questions, Gayl. I think in terms
of that accountability, that culture of accountability that has certainly, you know, invaded, and
is everywhere in the K12 world, I don't know if it will ever happen for us. I think I suggest
I wonder if, in many ways, our profession has hidden behind the concept of privacy to
avoid understanding our impact on individuals. And that's just something I've thought about
here and there. I mean, I understand it, I certainly support privacy, but I think we've
hidden behind it in the public library sector, perhaps. I also think that in terms of disruption,
and I remember Siobhan and I were on a grant panel meeting together earlier this year,
and don't tell my boss, but is the master's degree still the right container for professional
a professional academic credential? And I wonder what is unique about the MLIS that
means it has to be at that level? So I don't think I really answered that question but
I want to be sure and say that. >> MARK PUENTE: I was just going to add that
again in the academic library context with respect to, you know, rewards and that sort
of thing, I mean, that's so deeply embedded in that local context. I mean, we have academic
institutions that are in oneyear term appointments and then you have at the end of the spectrum,
librarians that have faculty status that are in these rigorous, rigorous promotion and
tenure tracks comparable to faculty, so it's so contextual and again looking at just the
explosion of the types of roles. I think that's going to be something that is just very difficult
to, you know, to really identify. >> SIOBHAN REARDON: And Gail I would say is
that what we were looking for in an entry level librarian ten years ago is not what
we're looking for in an entry level librarian now for sure, and Cindy Gibbon talked a lot
about kind of the skill set that we would prefer to see, things like we want someone
who is a problem solver, has budgetary skills, is a critical thinker, is a project manager.
I mean, these are amazing, amazing, and these are skills, so and a lot of time, you know,
we can so there's the change in the skill set because this is the kind of work that's
we really do push out a lot of projecttype work because of the changing nature and the
what's happening in any of our communities at any one point in time, but it's but I also
want to say that there's a real difference between the not all librarianship is created
equal, and so what we do is very, very different. And, you know, and that's something to have
a conversation about, really. Do we ask IMLS to support, you know, that great big venture
to really sort of create the concentrations? Because I think that that's going to be an
important piece of it. I don't know if I'm addressing your question, but I do think what
we were but I could tell you, so I'm going to hire somebody who, in the interview, comes
across as a creative critical thinker, loves project management, but in five years, is
that going to be what we need? Hopefully, but you never know. So I would the answer
to your question is no, there isn't. The long way to get out no.
>> DAVID LANKES: The other part of that is the delusion that we can prepare a librarian
for two years at the beginning of their career for everything that they're going to experience
until they're the director of Kansas City library with fooling fiber. When you graduated
with your program, sir, did you spend a lot of time on how fiber installation to the internet
was going to impact library service? >> I was a banker before.
>> DAVID LANKES: Yeah, there we go. >> I worked for Borden.
>> My dad did. And just before I give up the mic, there's some people on twitter that would
be remiss if I didn't say this, which is back to the obligation, which is you guys can be
extremely tired and it is legitimate criticism and an open conversation that we should have
on weather our students are prepared. I am sick to death of sending brilliant students
into the shredders of mediocrity. >> I agree.
>> There's nothing worse. I will say that those of us who have to suffer through civil
service, and I am alas to find a way to fund the death of civil service. I really would
like that very much, because then that is just you know, because you can hire the most
creative, energetic, wonderful librarian, and man, if they have the wrong manager, that
it is a terrible, terrible it is a terrible, terrible so we work a lot on the management
skills. But let me also say, so I don't because a lot of the library schools aren't aware
of this is that within because we have such movement in my library system and I can't
imagine that it's not the same in other public libraries, within 18 months to two years,
we're taking that library student and moving them into a management. They're the head of
a neighborhood library in a very short period of time, so the management skill sets is really
a critical piece for us. >> Hi. So my name is Michelle. I want to start
by asking whether or not just reflecting on the day that you thought curriculum changes
were necessary and what those might be. I think today we heard a lot about social and
health partnerships and services or hiring social workers. So is that something to think
about in terms of joint programmatic activity at the university level?
But I think my other question is kind of whether or not you see this connection and maybe a
partnership between curriculum development at a university and graduating an MLS student
versus the continuing Ed and kind of what's that arc and how might you see yourselves
working together to kind of prepare these people over time as things change.
>> DAVID LANKES: The very large answer and then I'll shut up, we right now have a commencement
model. We begin people in their careers. We give them an engineer, bachelor's degree.
Five years we throw them at a master's degree. Six years after that they lose track of what
they want to be with their life and we give them a Ph.D.
The right, yeah. The BandAid we then apply to it is continuing education, and one of
the things that we really, you know, in New York state, to be a public librarian, you
have to do 60 hours over five years of continuing education. That would be nice if we required
the same thing that we require of barbers in New York state for relevance. But we need
to move to a continuous education model where our alums teach our current students. Our
current students teach our professors. The idea that I may not be the best person to
do these field work, I love I'm stealing the mentoring idea.
>> I didn't invent it. So, yeah. >> Just to address your question about partnering
with continuing Ed, or that path as well as other programs, kind of in its beginning stages,
we've been having some conversations with another university in Denver, Regis University,
go Jesuits, and with their nonprofit management program, which DU is all about the forprofit
thing because it's a private university, and so we're talking to them about is there any
way as institutions we can share those tuition dollars which honestly, that's what drives
our institutions. So my university, certainly student quality is big, but tuition dollars
are more critical. It's a responsibility center management model in almost every university
I know of now. So partnering with another institution is very challenging because that
means those tuition dollars are split as well. But the investment in a new curriculum, additional
faculty when it comes to public administration or nonprofit management is still, that's a
big dollar amount that maybe that can be mitigated by a small amount of tuition dollars that
go to Regis that come here that go to Regis. So we've been talking about that as well as
the early childhood piece with our childhood and family folks.
>> MARK PUENTE: I could just add again for academic libraries, I'm not certain, and I
know there are more and more IMLS programs that are requiring experience prior to graduation,
more and more, I really wish that maybe even for, you know, public and other, you know,
school libraries as well that we could come to a point where a full oneyear residency
is a requirement for entry into the profession. I mean, I wish academic libraries would make
a commitment to that. I also think that it would be a fantastic conduit in terms of the
diversity conversation as well because we need that level of preliminary training. And
when we're in a marketplace where, you know, there are people applying hundreds of people
are applying for a single, you know, entry level position and probably half of them have,
you know, five or more years of professional experience. It's a tough time. It's a tough
market. But, you know, I mean, people are breaking through somehow, but if they're I
see that as an opportunity and if we're talking aspirational here, I would like to see a program
like that funded. Yes, absolutely. >> MARY STANSBURY: Just because my role on
the committee of accreditation, I pretty much know what every program is up to and actually
the requirement is dropping, as is research methods. There are very few programs that
actually require a research methods course. So the practical experience I think with the
increase in online programs, like I can't imagine how a huge online program is going
to be able to manage meaningful supervision of practical experience when they have people
from all over the world. So I agree with you, but I think it's going the other way.
>> Hi. I work for the State Library of Iowa, Iowa Library Services but I'm here representing
the association of rural and small libraries and I'm wondering what all of you think about
educating those librarians that are serving libraries that can't afford to pay a librarian
with an MLS or an MLIS, or whatever. >> DAVID LANKES: And let's be honest. Every
morning I have to stand up and look myself in the mirror and figure out if it's still
ethical to go into my job. I think we are now officially Syracuse's most expensive LIS
program. Simmons and I were going at it for a while, but I think we won.
>> MARY STANSBURY: We're up there. >> DAVID LANKES: It's a fantastic question.
And I've always said that there are three ways to become a librarian, but degree, by
job title, which, that's the reality, as you say, or by spirit, right? There are a lot
of people that are librarians that we just love and they just don't realize it yet. I
think that what we have to do is as a profession, acknowledge those three, work like hell to
get the people who became librarians by title to be proficient in our values, in our methods
to doing that, and then what we have an obligation to do is to make sure there is value in going
to that program for those who can afford it. Back to your social justice issue, which is
to work to mind out ways that we can blow up a model that is based on a threecredit
semester at a thousand dollars a credit. And I would love to say that we figured it out,
but, you know, Harvard screwed up when they tried to do it with Mooks. That didn't work,
so we're still trying to figure out a way to replace it, but the short answer is we
have an obligation as LIS instructors to get into those small libraries and support them
as much as anywhere because we're part of a profession not necessarily because we get
a tuition dollar and so I would hope that many of our faculty, many of which here are
great examples of it but we need more faculty to understand that that's part of their giveback
to the profession. >> MARY STANSBURY: But I would also say you're
bringing up a really interesting point about so what's the value of the ALAs and PLAs and
the responsibility to support the rural library staff in their work to professionalize the
work that they're doing because knowing that there just isn't the money to deal with it
now so how do we then support and create an opportunity so that these folks who are doing
really great work are acknowledged and respected in that way. I think that's really an important
point. >> And don't we see the state libraries, they're
doing a lot. >> DAVID LANKES: Vermont, Maine, Colorado,
Anne Craig was up here with Illinois. The program she mentioned, it's got all three
of those folks. >> We participated in that.
>> DAVID LANKES: That's right. Absolutely. >> Hi there. Mark mentioned that University
of Maryland is currently doing a series of programs on reenvisioning the MLS. Dave Lankes
was one of our first speakers in our speaker series. We are about to release a report very
soon about what we have found, but some of the things that we have found is that we get
really contradicting expectations from library directors, from library schools on what constitutes
an MLS, right? So and I sort of hear that as well during the conversation that we had
today. I think Dave mentioned, you know, what our librarians are supposed to do everything,
right? But one question that I have is how does how is ALA accreditation process is taking
these changes into consideration as we move forward?
>> MARY STANSBURY: We, at the mid winter meeting, actually, had our new accreditation standards
approved so I encourage all of you to check those out, ALA.org/accreditation. That gets
you to the office Web site and you'll find the new standards. So I mention that because
within the new standards and this doesn't this next piece doesn't really represent much
of a change, but within those standards, the way the curriculum, for example, standard
is worded is very loose. There is not a prescribed course in, heaven forbid, cataloguing, or
anything like that. And so the standards are actually very, very flexible because it's
about indication, indicative rather than prescriptive. Some of the sorry I schools have not necessarily
him, but some of the I schools have pushed back on ALA accreditation saying well, we
educate people who are not going into libraries. Well, it's the American Library Association
Standards For Accreditation, which to me means it is about libraries, and it's fine if a
program has all kinds of other degrees and all kinds of other curriculum concentrations,
but really, all ALA cares about is libraries. And I think that's appropriate.
>> I wouldn't disagree. >> Thanks. I wanted to respond to oh, yeah,
sorry. Thanks. I'm from the University of Tennessee, and I wanted to respond first to
my colleague from ARSL's comment that you had made, and we've been very fortunate to
be supported by the information technology, the rural librarian master scholarship program.
The first time there were 16 paraprofessionals who we were able to recruit from the nine
states in the Appalachian region, and have offered them an online distance education
program, realtime, where they were working. They continued to be working, but in the courses
that they were taking with us, we were getting them to develop management and I.T. products
and deliverables during the time that they were in the program, and so it was kind of
a winwin that they're working, and they're out the production and applications that they're
developing, management are very much contextually grounded because they're working and they
have that knowledge and they have that kind of information to make connections in between
the theory and the practice. Second version as well, 13 more students were
recruited, and now they are continuing in that process and will be completing in the
summer. So the question on sustainability, those we are having those students of course
they are continuing to work in those settings that they are in so they are engaging with
their staff, and they are using some of the things that they learn in taking their communities
and the libraries, as well as the services that they provide to them. So that's one way
to respond to that. I had a question for the panel, and to the
audience. I'm kind of surprised not to hear, as you mentioned about the pressures from
the pop administration, low recruitment numbers. Many high schools have moved towards undergraduate,
wholeheartedly taking on making full huge scale undergraduate degree programs, and that
is, of course, having pressures on the limited staff and faculty who are involved in MLS
training programs, and that does impact the nature of libraries, and what kind of professionals
we are able to bring, so what is the response of the audience and the panelists in terms
of the tendency to now are we moving towards undergraduate programs which might be more
than libraries, information professionals and other ways that they have been articulated
and described? Thanks. >> DAVID LANKES: The creation of the undergraduate
program at the I school of Syracuse is probably the best thing it ever did. I was a doctoral
student as that grew and I can tell you as a doctoral student, every year I got a little
less attention, a little less attention, so, you know, this is what you end up with an
undergraduate program. But I'll tell you, the good and the bad. The
good is actually it gets you more resources. It gets you tied directly into where a lot
of administrators pay a lot of attention, which is at undergraduate enrollment, much
more than they do at the graduate level and at largely, particular research university.
It brought in a great diversity to the people within the school. It brought in a lot of
opportunities and changes. So on the whole, I'm a big fan. It brought about two students
every three years into the LIS program. What they do is they go into a masters and information
management. Why? Because our undergraduate is in undergraduate information technology
and management so there's a clear track into the graduate level.
I'm not sure I could recruit undergraduates directly. We get some and they're brilliant
and they're wonderful and a lot of them don't understand it but it comes back to the idea
that they still identify a library and a building. And so could we do better? I'm not sure. But
I can tell you, having undergraduates around where our library science students are doing
information literacy instruction or working, I mean, you know, you want to work with resistant
populations to instruction. Undergraduates would be about the number one group. And so
by and large, I mean, I know, I was the one who talked about this fissure between the
information and library of science. That's not because of undergraduate programs. It's
because of opportunities that are being that they want our students. That leads to hiring
faculty that can prepare them and those faculty get farther and farther afield, and we have
not done a sufficient job, I'm just going to go ahead and claim that, thank you, sufficient
job of inculturating our faculties into our core values. It becomes the users are important.
It doesn't become the users are important and ethics are important and that's why privacy
is important, and that's how we found this kind of thing, and so we need to do a lot
more work to fuse these two together. The future of an I school is an I school, but
it's with library science and information science being indistinguishable, not in a
bunch of parallel silos. >> I'd like to make sure that we address the
question that IMLS has for us, which is how can they fund change in this arena of library
school curriculum and recruitment into our profession. So any thoughts.
>> MARY STANSBURY: Do you want us to respond, Bonnie?
>> BONNIE POSTLETHWAITE: I don't care. >> MARY STANSBURY: Well, I guess the question
of the container, the best container or the most useful container for indicating that
someone is prepared to enter the profession, whether it that be a bachelor's degree, a
master's degree, certificate, trying to understand what is valued about advanced education in
library science, valued to the community, valued to the profession, that question. It
would be interesting to fund the second phase of a pilot project of a clinical model with
academic libraries and a library science program just kidding that would be interesting a little
selfserving there. But I also wonder if this question of interdisciplinary might also be
one of the guidelines, I believe I'm right, with the present the present guidelines are
limited to Ph.D programs and library or information science, and not in for example, in my example
that I'll give, research methods and statistics, with a concentration in assessment or a concentration
in library science, or a concentration in institutional research, so that one guideline
I think might be an interesting one to look at in terms of broadening who we get with
the Ph.D. >> SIOBHAN REARDON: So I said it before. I
think one of the things that I would love to see is a conversation or to develop the
opportunity to create specializations. As I said, there's, you know, all librarianship
is not created equal, and so I'd love for the to see if there's the ability to create
concentrations, whether you want to become a public librarian or an academic librarian
or a school media specialist. So there's very different work that occurs in all of these
environments, and specialty librarians, I don't know how much that the strength of that
I guess the medical librarians for sure. But I just think that it's because of the
concentration and what the expectation is when those students come out that there's
strength, and it just helps. Not only does it help the schools, but it also certainly
helps the practitioners in the process. >> DAVID LANKES: Can I push back just a little
bit on that? >> SIOBHAN REARDON: Feel free.
>> DAVID LANKES: I'm not convinced that the difference between a small academic liberal
arts college with one librarian in it, that the difference between them and Harvard is
a less difference than a small academic library and a small public library and a small community
college. And I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure we know what those divides
are. And one thing that I saw recently is, you know, we have ARL talking about information
literacy standards. We have ASL that's been talking about them for 20 years. We have public
libraries that are now realizing that what they've been doing all this team now as this
phrase called information literacy, is they continue to segment and silo, what we're
going to end up with is I'm a huge fan of thinking librarians, that specialized, so
understand I just don't know if we have the right dividing lines for those specializations
yet. >> SIOBHAN REARDON: So that's the funding.
>> DAVID LANKES: Yes, we should be funded for that.
>> SIOBHAN REARDON: Absolutely. That's what we need is the examination of the possibilities
or, you know, as we talked about, the success or the challenges to that opportunity, but
I do think not to study it or not so I came out of library school in 2005 and I became
the director of the Westchester Library System so I took a class, and I took a children's
literacy class and I took everything that had absolutely nothing to do with the job
that I took, but it was really fun and expensive, but
>> MARY STANSBURY: I would add to we hear about I hear a lot about especially for academic
librarians and school librarians and sometimes it's by state credentialing expectations,
people who know how to teach. I also don't know how to prepare someone to diagnose on
a oneonone basis a patrons understanding of, let's say, a particular technology. How do
you do that? How do you know where to start with a patron who comes up to you in the middle
of the stack saying, how do I use this application. And we don't we don't teach our librarians
how to instruct in that oneonone level. And so how do we do that? That would be another
thing. >> DAVID LANKES: My only comment is that IMLS
wields a disproportionate sway in this field. I didn't say a bad one. I think it's a very
good one. But when you talk about specializations, there are online programs today because IMLS
decided we can say they're panels, but let's say the IMLS process decided that online education
was good. There are certificates and digital librarianship of which we just killed one,
because that was important. There are now in data curation. I am a huge fan of IMLS
and part of the reason I'm a huge fan of IMLS is that you have managed to take a relatively
small discretionary I mean in federal terms, you're taking an itty, bitty, tiny little
rounding error of discretionary research funding and shaped a profession, and this meeting
that we're here, hearing about progressive librarianship, hearing about community orientation,
hearing about diversity is important, hearing about all of these things and bringing it
across library type, is a decision, and it's a decision that shapes curriculum. It's a
decision that shapes programs, it's a decision that shapes research agenda, it's a decision
that shapes lives. And so what I would tell you is whatever you choose, because you've
been very active, and I have no fault with the with what you've been doing in shaping
curriculum, but to be well aware that you are shaping curriculum, and that the good
news is I think you've been doing it in a very positive, progressive manner, and I would
just encourage you to continue in a positive, progressive manner.
>> MARK PUENTE: I'd like to add that when I referred to that data point that I think
in the last five years, only 57% of all position descriptions posted on our Web site has the
MLS as a requirement or equivalence as a requirement, so there's that doesn't indicate in any way
how many people actually with MLIS has moved into those positions that didn't require the
MLIS, so I will say that, but I would think for our community well, I think for the profession,
I think it is it would be a useful exercise to research and examine those folks who are
coming into the profession outside of the traditional MLIS training and to figure out
how to instill those core values. Is there a way to engage MLIS programs in their training
and their development that doesn't necessarily end, you know, the final product isn't necessarily
an MLIS but that will make them more effective in that research intensive environment or
whatever your local, you know, library environment so I think there's an opportunity there.
>> DAVID LANKES: There's a comment from twitter in how well those folks do once they get in
there. I'm just repeating the comment, which I thought would be an interesting question.
>> To the first floor, and you'll see that right next to the gallery where the eminent
domain exhibit that you usually look at, you'll see we're about to create a computer area,
and you'll see some pictures of it. And the people that we're going to have management
manage it are the rest of our computers, if you look at the third floor, the fourth floor
today, it's reference librarians who are managing that area, reference librarians who are asking,
what's or answering, sorry, what's a URL question, how do I log on, how do I get a Gmail account
kinds of questions, which is a very high percentage of our reference questions down there, that
the highest, of course, number of questions, reference questions, highest percentages is
where is the bathroom. >> I thought it was did you find a thumb drive.
>> Exactly. And so we're going to and I learned this, I think I hope I'm right about this
when I first went to the Seattle library and I saw a big place on the third or fourth floor
where they've got massive number of computers and I went up to the desk and I asked them
who they were, who the people at the desk were and they were part of the I.T. department
of the Seattle Public Library, not part of the reference department. And the people we've
hired are not part of RIT department, but they're I.T.trained professionals who can
help people do what they do transactionally on computers, and my point there is that I
mean it's a point that all of you have been making, but I think there's a huge change
in who we are, and much of it is driven by technology, and I think it's that we have
been very slow, library schools, of course, have been slow, but there are plenty of courses
about this, but that's not what's valued in a library school, and maybe for good reason.
But if computers are a huge percentage of what we do, then we have to have I.T. professionals
running that part of our operation. And I would say, and I want to connect this to a
slightly larger comment, or a slightly larger issue that kind of United States, David, what
you were saying about how we call our customers, patrons, whatever, and you weren't talking
just about library, you were talking about library school, but and what Siobhan was saying
about engagement, civic engagement and public engagement, I think that it is a mistake to
think that there is one word to describe the people who use libraries. Every once in a
while I do use the user word and I get, why, you don't like it, but in our transactional
computer areas, it is actually functionally what's going on, and so it's useful to describe
it accurately. But I like words like patron for certain parts of what we do. I like the
word customer because I find that reference librarians typically have not been trained
in customer service, and need to be. I like the word "Citizen" periodically. I think citizen
engagement again, I think Siobhan may have used that word. I like the word "Neighbor,"
which I think one of used, which is a word that I haven't thought a lot about but I think
that's a great word, and I think there are a lot of different ways that we and that may
be the lesson, I think, of what needs to go on a library school. What needs to go on in
libraries, and maybe a little bit what needs to go on in our cities is to rethink the people
who are streaming through any public institution, but we're probably the best of the public
institutions in this regard, and discriminate in positive ways to what those people are
doing in your library, who they are in order to serve them better.
>> DAVID LANKES: And I would agree. My issue with patron, member, user, et cetera, is what
we call them amongst ourselves I think sets a terminology. In other words, when I teach
a class about "The user" generically, I think it sets a social construct that I'm not necessarily
happy with. But in terms of when you are part of your community, you learn names. I mean,
I personally like a name called David when I go into a library, right?
But I'll tell you, the number one question I'm asked these days, particularly of reference
desk is retasking, is the idea we're not getting that many questions, and I love the fact that
it doesn't turn in to yay, we can lay off librarians, but what should they be doing
now, and for me the future of reference is instruction. Reference interview is just an
instructional session. It's the same general sense of learning and such. And so I very
much respect, and the comments before about needing to bring in other folks, but I ought
to make sure that we don't tie our hands behind our back as a profession and say what you
were hired at 30 years is what you can only do. We need to make sure and by the way, David,
when someone said we should have a cage match, I'm going to give him a little ammunition.
What we as information, library schools, do really poorly is after they leave our building,
and what we need, and there's so much continuing education, the problem we have is not more
continuing education. The problem we need is coherent and coordinated continuing education
that is targeted. And if we can play a role in that, and I think we can, among other,
IMLS sponsored something called the Salisbury Curriculum, all these things, so I think there
is chance to do it but point well taken. >> BONNIE POSTLETHWAITE: I think we're about
at the end. Is there any final comment from anyone?
>> Well, may I just say as a librarian, not as an IMLS representative, I do think it goes
back to this whole idea of values, you know, that so many people have mentioned, and, you
know, I think we find the I.T. professionals that choose to work in libraries rather than
in financial institutions, where they could make three times as much and get a bonus that's
more than my annual salary, you know, it comes back to they want to work here because of
the type of work that we do, the service that we do.
>> BONNIE POSTLETHWAITE: Okay. Thank you.