Look What You Did To That Librarian!

If you spend any time at all with librarians employed by American universities, you will eventually hear grudging admission that the professional literature for the "discipline" of Library Science is less intellectually robust than that produced for other realms of higher education study. Perhaps the reason rests with those who create it. Regardless if one considers the subject to be equal to other college disciplines, library science has the disadvantage of being written mostly by people who do not do not actually teach it.

After all, faculty librarians at American universities do not teach students who intend to become librarians. That job is exclusively given to the very limited professoriate of the forty-seven ALA accredited graduate schools in the United States. For this very small cohort only, one assumes a more direct correlation between publication and teaching (which, incidentally, is done within the same nine months that other faculty perform the very same duties). In other words, when considering beyond publishing the many differences between library school faculty and academic faculty librarians, you can summarize in just three words: June, July, and August.

Furthermore, at least fourteen of those forty-seven ALA accredited library schools have in recent years shed the offending word “library” from their titles, hoping that their curiously bookless students will continue to pony up the tuition dollars to prepare for a career curating zeros and ones rather than codex collections. Even Forbes magazine has pointed out the failure of this strategy by defining the MIS degree as one of the worst choices for any graduate school student. Nevertheless, the Information Scientists who serve on the faculty of these schools research all kinds of computer alchemy to fill professional journals and bedazzle their screen-hypnotized acolytes.

Insisting that one can now be a librarian while simultaneously having nothing to do with books has not transformed the profession as much as it has killed it. Again we insist, books belong in the archives. Let the Information Scientists have their screens, metadata, and slavish attachment to all things digital!