Scott Walter

ALA Forum on Education for Librarianship

ALA President Michael Gorman will be sponsoring a “Forum on Education for Librarianship” at Midwinter. From the Midwinter catalog of events:

Forum on Education for Librarianship
Friday, January 20, 2006, 1:00 -5:30 pm
Location TBD

ALA President Michael Gorman invites library practitioners, educators and students to participate in a half-day forum to explore the big issues in library education: What is the nature of the profession of librarianship and what does the 21st century librarian need to know? How do we translate this understanding of our profession into a meaningful LIS curriculum? What are the implications for ALA accreditation? Presentations on these hot topics in LIS education will be followed by participant discussion and feedback. This is your opportunity to make your voice heard on an issue of vital importance to the future of our profession.

You may register using the online registration form at https://cs.ala.org/forumoneducation. There is no fee to register for this event.

I won’t be able to attend, but I hope someone will and will mine it for issues related to academic and research librarianship that can be blogged.

ACRL/Harvard 2006

ACRL has opened registration for the ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute 2006. Reviews of earlier Harvard programs have been strong, and this year’s program again promises participants the opportunity to explore their own leadership style and to critically evaluate how well-positioned their home institutions are to meet future challenges.

There are a variety of leadership development initiatives now available to librarians, including regional programs like TLA’s Tall Texans, IT-infused programs like EDUCAUSE’s Frye Institute, and programs designed to prepare leaders for specific initiatives, including information literacy instruction, and scholarly communication. And, of course, there’s Senior Fellows. I’d be interested to hear from program alumni what they gained from these programs in the area of leadership and, for those who have attended more than one, how they felt the different programs complemented one another.

An addendum: given all the resources dedicated to these programs, it’s also worth asking how effective they have been in terms of actually helping to prepare the current/next generation of library leadership. I remember some work that Mark Winston did some years back tracing the career trajectory of Snowbird alumni, but haven’t tracked any similar studies that may have been done of regional program alumni, etc.

ARL/ACRL Announce Scholarly Communications Institute

Building on the successful professional development model found in programs like the ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute and the Institute for Information Literacy Immersion program, ACRL will be teaming up with ARL to provide an Institute on Scholarly Communication in July 2006. From the brochure:

“As a participant in this 2.5 day immersion program, you will become fluent with scholarly communication issues and trends so that you are positioned to educate others on your library staff, engage in campus communications programs and other advocacy efforts, and work collaboratively with other participants to begin developing an outreach plan for your campus.”

No information yet on program faculty, but applications aren’t due until April 1, 2006, so there’s time for much more content to be delivered. Mark your calendars!

Open Access Comes to C&RL

ACRL has announced that content from College & Research Libraries will be made freely available on the ACRL Web site six months after publication, and that back issues from 1997 – are already available.

This is welcome news to those of us who have been calling for ACRL to provide leadership in this area for the past few years. I have to believe that our message to faculty about the need to commit to open access alternatives for Tier One scholarly journals can only be made more effective by being able to demonstrate that our own professional association has made that same commitment in regard to our most highly-regarded, peer-reviewed journal. It would be nice to see other leading LIS journals make this same commitment, but it was absolutely imperative that ACRL do so, and I’m excited to see that it has finally happened.

I’m also happy to see that the announcement clearly articulates ACRL support for author self-archiving of material published in C&RL. I had to do some digging myself earlier this year to determine ACRL policy on this issue as I was preparing to place a paper that I presented at the ACRL meeting in Minneapolis into our institutional repository (KU ScholarWorks). Lots of good news in this announcement!

Professional Education, Recruitment, and the Online Degree

Library Link of the Day brought me this interesting essay on online degree programs. In it, Karen Glover of Georgia Tech asks why a recent survey of HR professionals showed that they view online degrees as less “credible” than degrees earned through traditional, face-to-face programs. She wonders about this bias, and so would I (although Glover doesn’t say that the survey she cites was of HR professionals in libraries, which seems a significant point to omit). I’ve taught in 2 online MLS programs (Illinois and San Jose State) and have found the majority of my students to be as actively engaged in preparing for a career in libraries as anyone that I knew during my own F2F MLS program at Indiana. Although my perspective on their work is typically limited to what they do for my class, I certainly think that they have the opportunity to receive as good a pre-service professional education as I did (although, as anyone who has read my work knows, I’ve taken issue with a number of aspects of professional education for librarians, in general, and those issues are not any less evident in online degree programs).

Professional education and recruitment into the profession have been identified by ACRL as one of the top issues facing academic librarianship, and there is no question that the availability of online degree programs has opened up the field to people who cannot relocate to one of the cities housing a F2F program, and has opened up opportunities (albeit limited ones) for practicing librarians also not located near one of these programs to take part in LIS education. I know that I would not be at all “concerned” if a candidate for a position at Kansas had completed the ALA-accredited degree through an online program (and I might well be thinking about how that experience could translate into effective delivery of services to faculty and students making use of Blackboard here). Others? Is Glover’s citation of the general study not applicable to the academic library environment, or is this something that needs further research within our own community? Is there any difference between completing one’s pre-service professional education in an online environment vs. completing continuing education (much of which is sponsored by LIS programs and by ACRL) in that same environment?