LIS Education

HLS/ACRlog: How to Encourage and Assist New Subject Librarians

Today we welcome a post by Zoë McLaughlin as part of our collaboration with Hack Library School . Zoë McLaughlin is a Master’s student at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. She plans to become an area studies librarian focused on Southeast Asia. Her main area of focus is Indonesia, though lately she spends a lot of her time cataloging Malay-language books and learning Thai. In her spare time, she translates Indonesian fiction and poetry, writes fiction, reads everything she can get her hands on, and dances. Find her on Twitter, LinkedIn, or at her personal blog.

This summer, I attended a meeting that brought together a number of people with an interest in Southeast Asia, including subject librarians. During the meeting, someone brought up the question of how to encourage and assist people who might want to become Southeast Asia subject librarians themselves. I did not have any answers at the time, but I’ve since done some thinking about institutional memory, my current precarious-feeling position in the field, and what the future might hold. With this in mind, I’d like to present some suggestions for encouraging and helping newcomers to Southeast Asia librarianship and to subject librarianship more broadly.

Provide short-term opportunities

The internships I’ve completed have been invaluable in learning about a specialized field. I can acquire general knowledge of library science in my classes, but working in a real working environment teaches new skills that I cannot learn anywhere else. I’ve learned about Romanization tables and how to acquire government publications. We didn’t talk about this in library school.

If you have a short-term project and you could use some help, please circulate that information. While paid internships and other short-term opportunities are obviously ideal, publicize unpaid opportunities as well—I might be able to find the funding on my own. This way, I can learn from you; you can get help with a project; and the commitment required from both of us is specific and relatively small.

Provide extended opportunities

Again, I recognize that finding funding for anything, particularly something long-term, can be a challenge. However, this is the most direct way to influence my professional trajectory and pass on institutional knowledge. As I begin my own job search, I am considering applying to residencies as a way to get this sort of experience for myself. That said, residencies are few and far between, especially ones with an area studies focus.

But imagine a residency geared specifically toward training new subject librarians. This would provide space for new librarians to learn and for seasoned librarians to teach, while removing the pressures of working in what can often be a solitary subject librarian position.

A program such as this would take work to pull off, which leads me to my next point:

Advocate from within your institution

Situated within a university, you are already positioned to advocate for change in a way that I am not. Propose the creation of learning opportunities—short- and long-term—for emerging professionals to learn the intricacies of the field. Large, institutional changes need to come from within. Push for the creation of new residency programs or formalized internship programs. Present your concerns about the future of the field to your library and ask for help in finding solutions.

Provide guidance

If you are not in a position to provide large or extensive opportunities, your guidance and advice is still invaluable. Let me know about conferences, meetings, and other events that you think might interest me or might benefit my professional growth. I cannot stress how important it was when my mentor offhandedly mentioned that I might want to attend the Association for Asian Studies conference. Not only did I learn much more about the profession simply from attending meetings at the conference, I also made contacts that led me to securing my summer internship.

Small conversations can also benefit me greatly: tell me about the path that led to your current job, tell me about how you track down hard-to-find books, tell me about useful contacts that you’ve made over the years and how you managed to make them. Informal conversations can be as helpful as more formal opportunities.

Foster partnerships between institutions

Especially in a field as small as Southeast Asian studies, we are spread out between institutions and locations. New librarians are just at the beginning of their careers while others are retiring; the retention of institutional memory extends beyond a single university’s walls. Working together, we can share knowledge and collaborate on projects larger than those within a single institution. This can ensure broad continuity and smoother transitions moving forward.

Reach out and we can work together! Ultimately, we’re both interested in furthering knowledge about our specific field, so let’s figure out ways to make that happen!

HLS/ACRLog: First Generation College Students and the Job Search with an MLIS

Today we welcome a post by Chloe Waryan as part of our collaboration with Hack Library School . Chloe Waryan is a MLIS candidate at the University of Iowa. She entered into the library field by way of urban public libraries, as a patron, a volunteer, and eventually an employee. She now works as a technical editor for an academic journal. Chloe’s professional interests include access, preservation, and outreach.

I am not sure if any time is “the best time” to choose to go to graduate school for library and information science, but 2016 was definitely an interesting choice. Growing up, I knew very few professionals with college degrees, so I was not prepared for the relative poverty that most graduate students live in today. Like many of my classmates, paying for library school is constantly on my mind, as it is the biggest purchase I’ve ever made. There is an immense privilege attached to going to college, yet it comes with an extreme price tag. Despite our oversharing culture, high tuition has become the new normal and it is hardly ever discussed. It’s a confusing time. Is it hypocritical for academics to complain about high tuition? Can students be against degree inflation while still being supportive of the education we are receiving? The hardest part of starting library school last year wasn’t the coursework or the final exams. It was attempting to wrestle with the value and the values of my soon-to-be-obtained MLIS.

We’ve all heard the phrase: “the college degree is becoming the new high school diploma!” This means that despite the high tuition, the college students today are not the elite. Students from all economic classes are awarded the great opportunity to attend college, with help from scholarships and loans. According to the 2010 study from the Department of Education, an estimated 50% of all college students currently enrolled are first generation college students (including myself), who are statistically at a greater risk for dropping out due to many factors, one being imposter syndrome.

Have you ever hesitated to apply for a job because you think you’re not qualified? That is imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome has the potential to follow students not only through their bachelor’s programs, but their graduate programs and job search. According to many postings on the ALAJoblist, one must have an MLIS to become an academic librarian. Often time, a second master’s degree or Ph.D. is preferred. Amidst the ever-changing environment of higher education, we are no longer advocating towards lifelong learning as “a key to longer, healthier, more satisfying and productive lives,” (Education and Continuous Learning, ALA) but rather, pushing “lifelong learning to stay employed,” (Kim, 2). If degree inflation continues in this rate, a Ph.D. will be required to hold a librarian position. If that becomes the case, who will we be excluding?

I admire librarians who have decades of library experience but no college degree. When I graduate, they will still be far more experienced than I. They are the toughest, smartest, kindest professionals, and I consider them pioneers in their field. My hero librarians have gained their expertise by working in a professional environment, taking classes as non-degree seeking students, critically thinking on their own, and of course, through reading books. They do not see gaining a library job as an endgame, but rather as an opportunity to potentially learn what they were not afforded to learn in college. If they applied for another job either laterally or higher up, they would not get the position because of their lack of formal education. Potential employers would be missing out on their creativity, productivity, and entrepreneurial spirit. I have also known librarians who have Ph.D.s who have seem to forgotten the core values of librarianship. We are working with two different sets of standards: one set is formal education and one set is experience. Hiring committees should be able to reflect in their postings that both sets have merit. If anyone can compromise between two different sets of standards, a librarian can.

By putting a college degree on a pedestal, we exclude others who have chosen not to get or who are barred from getting the education with which we are privileged. If degree inflation continues, I predict that the LIS field will include those who feel comfortable in an academic setting, thus excluding the first generation college students currently enrolled in America (which, as a reminder, is half of everyone currently enrolled in college). Why are we not hiring people who accurately represent the demographics of our school? I will add that this is not necessarily all our fault, as much of this comes from administration and union restraints, from the competitive job market and from our fear-driven economy. The anxiety and fear we face as library professionals in America right now is overwhelming. We can only try to be more welcoming to those who offer unique perspectives.

To be clear, I do not think that the MLIS isn’t valuable. It is a huge accomplishment. Aside from luck, convenience and privilege, I work towards a master’s degree because I want a job that I enjoy, and I want to prepare myself for that job through a combination of schooling and work. However, I must admit that the thought of applying for a job as an academic library is incredibly intimidating. I have heard stories about the all-day interviews. I have been told to save a few thousand dollars to travel to interviews. I have also been told to brush up on my dining etiquette because the casual lunch “counts.” Even after overcoming the struggles of a first generation college student, I fear that I am unemployable. As academic librarians, you have a responsibility to your students and your applicants. It is your responsibility to show these new faces that they have unique perspectives needed in their respective fields, their institution is proud to be represented by them, continuing education is something to be admired and it is never a burden to ask for help. You also have a responsibility to yourself. Show that the journey doesn’t end with the completion of the degree. Welcome and learn from your coworkers. Despite the larger issues in America, patience and compassion towards everyone, no matter what socioeconomic background, can create a new era in which everyone will want to become librarians.

Thank you to ACRLog and Hack Library School for this opportunity.

References:

Cardoza, Kavitha. “First-Generation College Students Are Not Succeeding in College, and

Money Isn’t the Problem.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 20 Jan. 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/01/20/first-generation-college-students-are-not-succeeding-in-college-and-money-isnt-the-problem/?utm_term=.d26f3ac65369.

“Education and Continuous Learning.” About ALA, American Library Association, 13 May 2013, www.ala.org/aboutala/missionhistory/keyactionareas/educationaction/educationcontinuing.

“Home.” First Generation Foundation, First Generation Foundation, 2013, www.firstgenerationfoundation.org/.

Kim, Bohyun. “Higher ‘Professional’ Ed, Lifelong Learning to Stay Employed, Quantified Self, and Libraries.” ACRLog, ACRL, 1 Apr. 2014, acrlog.org/2014/04/01/higher-professional-ed-lifelong-learning-to-stay-employed-quantified-self-and-libraries/.

The Grossly Exaggerated Death of the Library, or Why I Don’t Discourage Students from Attending Library School.

What do you say to the next generation of Librarians? Since I’m a First-Year Academic Librarian Experience I would assume the “next generation” is probably me, and it is a little too soon to play the grizzled older “in my day” type librarian. Because I work in a University Library, I know students finishing their undergraduate degrees considering graduate school or library school. They ask me if library school is a good idea and what a person like them should do if they’re interested in the humanities. I suspect that because I’m so close to having finished school I am sensitive to those questions. After my own negative experiences in undergraduate and graduate school, I have decided that I will not discourage anyone from the path that I succeeded on. I ask those who tell students not to pursue librarianship where else these students should focus their energies?

Libraries have a real crisis of confidence. Google “don’t go to library school” (I took a screen shot so you don’t actually have to google it) and you’ll see the kind of pessimism that plagues our students. The result of this is that students have a clear and unhealthy obsession (see any /r/Librarians Reddit posts), in some ways encouraged by current librarians, about whether or not they’ll get a job at the end of school. It doesn’t help that resources like Hiring Librarians, while a great source of information, often publishes the most pessimistic and disheartening interviews with “hiring” managers. Librarianship is dying, everyone abandon ship.

As a student, I wrote extensively about this phenomena and how it breeds insecurity and negativity in already stressful student lives. Now that I’m a professional I see that this insecurity and negativity then leads to an undervaluing of the work that we do on college campuses. Many of us had formative experiences working closely with librarians in University Libraries and wanted to “pay it forward” by being part of the library-industrial-complex. When we tell students not to pursue what we have succeeded at we tell them that they are not as good, elite, or lucky as we are.

Judging from my friends and colleagues, I know that these concerns are not limited to librarianship. Anxiety over jobs and the economy is one of many issues that drove voters to the polls seeking “change” a month ago. Many of you will say “but librarianship is special because it is really dying!” Much of this is predicated on a longstanding prophecy of the death of print and of the book itself (after all what is a library if not a place for books). Whether or not this death comes from technology or from a deep-seated American anti-intellectualism, the threat to learning and reading impacts directly on our profession. Ongoing austerity movements in government challenge librarians to justify their own existence. But our “worth” is transcendent as J. Stephen Town writes “relying on a shared belief that there is an impact through higher education on individuals and society, and beyond that there is a value arising from being educated, which relates in a fundamental way to human flourishing.”(112) While “human flourishing” is difficult to measure it is unlikely our society will totally move past an expectation of education and learning as a hallmark of growth. But if we cannot measure the impact of the library, how do we know that it isn’t dying?

In anticipation of the death of libraries, there are two paths that librarians and scholars have taken. One has been toward change and innovation (or as a pessimist might say bargaining) where we change what we do and how we measure it to prove our worth and the other toward resignation and defeatism, where we tell people the library is dead and not to join our funeral parade. There is a great article that counters this pessimism entitled “The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library!” where the authors acknowledge that the academic library faces competition in the digital world as we are no longer the chief source of information for students and the public while positing the changes we need to make to ensure our own survival.(Ross 146) The “information fog,” as William Badke calls, makes us all lost and librarians are those who can leads us through the murk.

Interestingly, the rise of the anti-intellectual is often attributed as either the result or the cause of the libraries downfall. The ongoing and well publicized struggles with “fake news” are seen as either calls to arms for librarians or defeated examples of the long decline of the library in American life. Either way, the importance of librarians is still central to the teaching of information efficacy and theory, and, if the present crises in media confidence shows, we will always be needed. The library is not dying, it is changing. This is not outside of our own history nor is it something about which we should be afraid. Students should be aware of that change and the challenges of the future but never discouraged by it. If we believe that the current and future work is worth doing then we should encourage those likeminded students to continue our cause.

I do not want to downplay the struggles of unemployed or underemployed librarians, and I don’t ascribe to the ongoing and troublesome myth that librarians will be retiring and we’ll all get nice paychecks when that happens. I also do not want to paint a rosier picture than exists for new graduates. There are real struggles for people wanting to get into librarianship, but we should never discourage those that are interested in our work from getting involved. If every Library student listened to their faculty mentors about not applying to graduate school we’d have no graduate students next year, and no new librarians in two years, and our universities would collapse along with society. This is an exaggeration, but if I was discouraged from reading about how librarianship was dying, I wouldn’t have the job that I enjoy so much. I expect that many of you had that same discussion and warning prior to enrolling in school. Losing people like us is the danger in telling students not to pursue the work that we love.

References:

Badke, William. Research strategies. iUniverse: New York, 2004.

Town, J. Stephen. “Value, Impact, and the Transcendent Library: Progress and Pressures in Performance Measurement and Evaluation.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 81, no. 1 (2011): 111-25. doi:10.1086/657445.

Ross, Lyman, and Pongracz Sennyey. “The library is dead, long live the library! The practice of academic librarianship and the digital revolution.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34, no. 2 (2008): 145-152.

Publishing Practice: Developing a Professional Identity

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Chelsea Heinbach, MLIS student at the University of Denver; Cyndi Landis, MLIS student at Emporia State University, and Alison Hicks, faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

How can we bridge the divide between learning about library instruction and engaging more concretely with a teaching librarian’s values and responsibilities? This was the question that drove the design of a writing assignment in our recent library instruction course at the University of Denver, and that we have been grappling with since the semester ended. Designed to mimic a core part of many academic teaching librarian positions, as well as to involve students more closely with teaching librarian communities, the assignment asked students to write a 3000 word essay that was peer-reviewed by librarians in the field, and published as an Open Access book.

Drawing from the idea of publishing as pedagogy, as well as sociocultural learning theories that emphasize participation rather than imitation, students were excited to mold the assignment on the first day of class. At the same time, the prospect of writing for a broad audience at this stage of a career was very different from previous LIS program experiences. This blogpost serves to explore the experiences of two MLIS students who participated in this project, Chelsea Heinbach (University of Denver) and Cyndi Landis (Emporia State University), as well as attempting to reflect on the role and nature of instruction librarian education today.

Merging practice and theory

The MLIS degree is largely practical in nature. As academic librarians in training we talk about publishing as well as open access, conferences, and peer review, but there is often little room built in for identifying our own place in these processes. While there are opportunities to publish as a student, there are rarely chances in class to simulate the peer review process and to treat our work as serious academic contributions. The future regarding our own publishing remains abstract for the entirety of our master’s degree and there are few chances to explore our professional writing goals and ideas. This assignment offered us valuable mentorship in academic writing, extensive and thoughtful suggestions for improvement, as well as an opportunity to explore our professional identity in a supportive environment.

Value

As a graduate student, there is pressure to have something on your resume to make you stand out among the pool of job applicants. We each scramble to find that extra separator to distinguish ourselves from others or at least to fill in the blanks of which accomplishments we think we should have by now. This assignment was something we could be proud of and use to prove ourselves.

Excitement and intimidation swept over us as we began to research and select our instruction topics. What did we want to know as a future teaching librarian? What could we research to make this open access book contribution count? This assignment was the opportunity we’d been waiting for throughout our graduate school experience – a professional introduction into scholarship that was guided and supported rather than just an assignment to be completed and tucked away in our personal portfolio.

Unlike most research papers throughout our LIS programs, this assignment would be shared with professionals beyond the student-teacher relationship. Not only would library professionals assist in the peer-review process, but the open access book would later be promoted within the LIS field as an example of this unique approach. This exercise was designed to emulate what research could be like in the “real-world”. Even the peer reviewers wished they had a similar opportunity when they were in school.

While we recognized this as a valuable opportunity that we were excited to engage with, we also grew nervous about the implications. With the permanence of this piece weighing heavy on each step of the writing and research process, we began to unravel the pieces of its potentially lasting effects. What topic would best fit our future career goals? Would it be something we could use to start building our curriculum vitae? Throughout the assignment, we felt the reality of this valuable opportunity sinking in, causing us to reflect hesitantly on the formation of our professional identity and our overall contributions to the field.

Editing

As we received feedback from our instructor and reviewer, the constructive comments revealed areas for improvement. Our wandering thoughts now had direction and our emphatic assertions were paired within the context of practicing librarians; we had a glimpse into our book’s audience and we could refine our papers with confidence.Throughout our academic careers, we had rarely received the opportunity to improve our scholarly writing within the assignment, or even within the course. The peer-review process gave us genuine, productive feedback to revise our paper before submitting the final piece for publication.

The feedback was two-fold, receiving detailed comments from Alison and our peer-reviewer. Comments ranged from pointing out areas to improve writing clarity, to making connections to concepts that we hadn’t seen before, and suggesting other sources to use for a broader perspective. As we are not yet practicing librarians, we found that some of the issues we wanted to discuss are already common knowledge in the profession. The reviewers’ comments provided the insight of instruction practitioners, helping us identify what truly needed further discussion and what research conclusions would prove helpful to our professional audience.

The level of detail in the feedback given in this assignment highlighted the lack of response have routinely received throughout our academic careers. With a few exceptions, we have rarely received suggestions for improvement on our work and instead have simply received a grade. After pouring hours into research and writing, a final grade isn’t as satisfying as encouragement and thoughtful recommendations for further development. Up until this point, some of our most demanding academic work stemmed from our expectations of ourselves and our future goals.

Identity

This assignment, therefore, provided a welcome break from the standard dynamic, as it gave us an opportunity to explore and assert our views in a way that felt more impactful than a simple class paper. It was encouraging to be taken seriously by a professional in the field and to have the opportunity to contribute to such a unique project.

However, after the excitement of the opportunity wore off, we realized we felt nervous about moving from passively reading the literature to owning our own viewpoints. This class is a mere ten weeks long and, as students, many of us are balancing multiple jobs, volunteer positions, job applications, committee obligations, and other classes. In addition, the academic library world can feel like an overwhelmingly polarized place where work is judged and dismissed openly and critically. While these conversations lead us to important awakenings regarding issues in the profession, we found it difficult to feel comfortable as students making assertions when we were still developing our own positions. Perhaps this was simply due to overzealous imposter syndrome, but it is why some of us ultimately focused on topics that were not overwhelmingly controversial, and decided against making an obvious political statement with our work.

In the end, this pressure to cultivate raw ideas and develop work that would be seen led to a more genuine interaction with the content than we have had in most other classes. Ultimately, it helped us develop our professional research goals in a more concrete and granular way, giving us a better understanding of publishing demands. At the same time, the intersection between student research and professional practice exposed some eye-opening issues that arise for LIS students. We are taught general theories of librarianship and given research assignments with little guidance of whether our conclusions and assertions are appropriate in the context of the challenges professionals face. To combat this block between the classroom and our professional careers, one of the most beneficial experiences we can have during library school is a mentor in our chosen area of librarianship.

We really appreciated the feedback and we encourage librarians to seek out opportunities to mentor LIS students, to share their professional experiences, and to help to bridge the divide between theory and practice. This project enlisted an enthusiastic group of librarian reviewers, who we recognize as invisible laborers behind its success. We are grateful to them for their collaborative participation and commitment to bettering LIS student work through this publishing practice. Lastly, this memorable assignment would not have been possible without Alison’s insightful vision, reviewer matchmaking, and endless encouragement. When students and professionals engage in dialogue, it fuels our profession with a stronger foundation of new ideas and perspectives.

Advice and suggestions for future improvements

For anyone who is interested in building upon this assignment, we would offer the following advice:

Scaffold: The assignment built in plenty of drafting time so the peer review really helped to edit and shape the final essays. At the same time, many students found that choosing a relevant topic was tough. We suggest plenty of class discussion about potential directions, as well as interviewing a professional before starting in order to get guidance.
Workshop: Our class did not build in any in-class workshopping, but that could have made the delivery of the first draft less stressful. The process of reviewing other people’s work is always helpful for writers to experience, too.
Connect: This assignment was strengthened through the matching of reviewers with paper topics about which they were knowledgeable. Although the entire process was double blind,we found that this expertise, as well as the sincerity that the reviewers brought to the assignment, added considerably to the development of the second draft.

Read the book online: http://gotaminute.pressbooks.com/
Read the archived PDF: http://digitalcommons.du.edu/lis_stuother/3/

Practitioner Engagement in LIS Education

Check out our post on HLS today too! Callie Wiygul, ACRLog FYAL blogger, compares the challenges of graduate school to her experience in the academy in “The Perils of Seeing a Job as Your Endgame.” See more information about the HLS/ ACRLog collaboration here.

Elizabeth Lieutenant is a current MSL(I)S student who will be graduating in May 2016. Her research explores how higher education structures, systems, and processes can be used to promote reflective praxis, student agency, educational equity, and organizational change. Elizabeth has presented her research on LIS student engagement in systematic planning at the Second Rutgers iSchool Research Invitational for Master’s Students, the Association for Library and Information Science Education 2016 Annual Conference, and the forthcoming Catholic University of America Eighth Annual Bridging the Spectrum Symposium and iConference 2016, respectively. Elizabeth was asked to write about if (and how) practicing librarians should be engaged in LIS education.

As a current LIS student, constituent engagement in higher education is one of my passions. Most of my attention has focused on improving student engagement in LIS education. I’ve spent the past year researching LIS student engagement in systematic program planning: The methods used to engage students, how systematically these methods are employed, and the types of programmatic changes implemented based on student engagement. Some of my most rewarding pre-professional experiences have been improving student engagement within my own LIS program: Organizing engagement sessions and meetings, creating and disseminating surveys and analyzing their data, and collaboratively leading various systematic planning initiatives to improve our students’ educational experiences. I will graduate in a few months and will soon be a practicing academic librarian. Shifting my focus from student to practitioner engagement in LIS education is a natural extension at this point in my career.

Practitioners, students, faculty, staff, alumni, employers, and university partners should each play an active and substantive role in LIS education. Each of these constituency groups has unique areas of expertise, perspectives, and needs that, when coupled together, can inform improvements to LIS education programs. The inclusion and engagement of diverse perspectives in LIS education ensures that program initiatives better serve their community, decision-making processes effectively respond to constituents’ needs, and collective praxis facilitates the educational formation of LIS students. Typical approaches to practitioner engagement in LIS education are usually confined to practica supervision, guest lecturers, and LIS student mentorship. However, these methods do not provide practitioners opportunities to engage in LIS education as broadly or substantively as they could.

Substantial practitioner commentary on LIS education exists, but most of this discourse is confined to informal venues: Blog posts, Twitter conversations, or advice to individual LIS students. There exists a far smaller pool of practitioner-led research on LIS curricula, the professional and educational preparation of LIS students, and the staffing needs of libraries and information centers. Recent scholarship on LIS curricula coverage of assessment and evaluation (Askew & Theodore-Shusta, 2013), copyright and intellectual property (Schmidt & English, 2015), and financial management (Burger, Kaufman, & Atkinson, 2015) revealed substantial deficits in preparing students to engage in professional practice. This type of research provides actionable data for LIS programs to benchmark their strengths and weaknesses and develop new curricula to respond to the profession’s needs.

Practitioner educators can also contribute a wealth of practical knowledge and expertise to LIS programs. Academic librarians who also serve as adjunct faculty are able to more deeply engage with a greater number of LIS students than they feasibly could in almost any other capacity. The mentoring relationships fostered with LIS students who take courses taught by adjunct faculty can be particularly rewarding for both parties (Brown, 2007). While I don’t support poorly compensated academic labor or precarity in higher education, practitioners who have the economic privilege to assume an adjunct teaching appointment play a critical role in enhancing LIS education.

Engagement in LIS program governance is another avenue for practitioner to substantively contribute to LIS education. Unlike informal dialog between practitioners and educators, committees, boards, and other governance bodies are structured, sustainable, and oft-times privileged venues for engaging in LIS education. Based on the most recently published ALISE Statistical Report (Albertson, Culbert, Snow, Spetka, & Hollenkamp, 2015), 17.6% of the 51 reporting schools included alumni representatives on their curriculum committees and 15.7% included practitioner representatives. These numbers fall far below staff (49.0%), student (60.8%), and faculty (100.0%) representation. Clearly, there are opportunities for LIS programs to improve practitioner engagement in program governance.

In my former position as an graduate assistant, I collaboratively initiated a number of processes that strengthen my own LIS program’s relationships with its constituents, including reestablishing the LIS Advisory Board. In recruiting eight new members to the Board, the LIS Department Chair and I ensured the Board included representatives from each of our constituency groups – students (now alumni), full-time and adjunct faculty, program administration, practitioners, alumni, employers, and university partners – to reflect our diverse community. Practitioners do not need to have an established relationship or formal alumni/instructor affiliation with an LIS program to serve as governance representatives. We all have biases, preferences, and limitations; representatives without an established affiliation can provide a impartial external perspective on a particular program’s strengths and weaknesses.

I have outlined a few opportunities for practitioners to be engaged in LIS education, but a program’s organizational culture – defined by its leadership and decision-makers – may preclude constituent engagement. Academic privilege, exclusionary practices, and personal biases all play a role in who is or is not invited to engage. As one of the presenters at the 2015 ALISE Annual Conference succinctly stated, “constituent engagement is important, but if your faculty and staff don’t want to engage, it’s not going to happen.” Even those who are invited to the table may be silenced by those in positions of power. Those few who do speak in this type of culture may find their knowledge dismissed, their contributions disdained, and their perspectives marginalized.

These types of exclusionary practices can have deep ramifications for LIS programs. A lack of constituent engagement in LIS education can lead to degradations of program quality, perceptions of irrelevancy to the profession, and, as the ALA’s Task Force on Library School Closing concluded, dissolution (Jeng, 2006). Yet even with these negative implications, LIS programs may still struggle to engage. LIS students at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Pratt Institute have publicly expressed concerns about their respective program’s lack of constituent engagement. It is not my intention to single out these two programs as negative examples of how to engage constituents – each LIS program has its strengths and weaknesses – but it does underscore the importance of program transparency, inclusivity, and communication.

I personally support these types of student-led initiatives to the hold their LIS programs accountable and sometime wish that LIS practitioners were more proactive in doing the same. My own work in trying to reestablish constituent engagement methods and relationships would have been far easier if other constituents had worked together to ensure that those relationships had not been neglected for years. While it may be easy for practitioners to dismiss the relevance of LIS education to our profession’s needs, it is those dismissals that contribute to LIS failing the future of our profession. Just as academic librarians must work with their constituents to better contribute to their scholarly communities, LIS programs and their constituents must work together to better contribute to our profession.

Of course, LIS programs cannot act on all suggestions, implement all improvements, or address all aspects of the profession. That would be akin to assuming that academic librarians can provide their scholarly community with unlimited access to all published scholarship, a heroic yet impractical ideal. However, there are opportunities to strengthen LIS education, and constituent engagement in LIS education can be a primary motivator for programs to improve. My own scholarship aims to motivate LIS programs to adopt decision-making processes that are inclusive of their students’ perceptions, voices, and needs. LIS programs cannot (and, I would argue, should not) reinvent themselves based on the suggestions of a few constituents. While I am realistic about these limitations, I am also optimistic that my contributions will have a tangible positive impact on LIS education.

As an aspiring academic librarian, one would undoubtedly assume that I assess LIS education based on my professional and intellectual needs. While there are particular experiences I wish my LIS program provided me, I don’t have a prescriptive vision for what LIS education should be, nor should I! I believe LIS education should be defined at the local level. My vision for LIS education is for programs to reflect the needs, values, and perspectives of their community. Actualizing that vision requires the engagement of members of all constituency groups: practitioners, students, faculty, staff, alumni, employers, and university partners. Whether the needs and values of a program’s community require a traditional approach to entry-level librarianship or a radical, forward-thinking approach to the information professions does not matter to me. What matters is having a LIS program’s community collaboratively provide its student with the preparation needed to ensure they graduate equipped to better meet their needs of their own constituencies.

I am personally grateful to the many professionals and fellow students who have played a role in my educational formation. I would not still be a student in my program without their support, guidance, and encouragement. However, our traditional approaches to practitioner engagement in LIS education – networking, mentoring, guest lectures, and resume reviews – is not enough to support LIS students. Those few who have played an active role in my LIS program, who have been engaged in my program, who have advocated for our students to be provided the opportunities and experiences we need, who have amplified our student’s voices, who have fought for an inclusive educational community, those are ones to whom I am forever indebted. Those are the ones we need more of. Practicing librarians should not just play a peripheral role in LIS education. Practitioners must be fully engaged in LIS education to better support the educational formation of our students, for it is our students who are tasked with creating the future of our profession.

So, how will you support the future of our profession?

References

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ALISE 2015 annual conference. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.alise.org/alise-2015-conference.

Askew, C. A., & Theodore-Shusta, E. (2013). How do librarians learn assessment? Library Leadership & Management, 28(1), 1-9.

Bajjaly, S., Burnett, K., Hastings, S. K., Hirsh, S., Marek, K., & Most, L. R. (2015, January). Representation for all: Including stakeholders in LIS program governance in a changing world. Juried panel presented at the meeting of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, Chicago, IL.

Brown, S. W. (2007). The adjunct life. Library Journal, 132(11) 42-44. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/libr_pubs/9.

Burger, R. H., Kaufman, P. T., & Atkinson, A. L. (2015). Disturbingly weak: The current state of financial management education in library and information science curricula. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 56(3), 190-197. doi:10.12783/issn.2328-2967/56/3/2.

CUA LIS Advisory Board. (2015, November 23). Retrieved from http://lis.cua.edu/about/LISadvisoryboard.cfm.

Hackney, S. (2015). SILSSA and the School of Information. Pratt SILSSA: The Student Association for the Pratt School of Information. Retrieved from http://silssa.prattsils.org/silssa-and-the-school-of-information/.

Helregel, N. (2014). Administrative transparency & LIS education. Hack Library School. Retrieved from http://hacklibraryschool.com/2014/12/11/administrative-transparency-lis-education/.

Jeng, L. H. (2005). Final report (2004-2005 ALA CD#48). Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/offices/sites/ala.org.offices/files/content/hrdr/abouthrdr/hrdrliaisoncomm/committeeoned/Library%20School%20Closi.pdf.

Schmidt, L. & English, M. (2015). Copyright instruction in LIS programs: Report of a survey of standards in the U.S.A. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 41(6), 736–743. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2015.08.004.