A question of degrees for academic librarians

College Student Journal, Sept, 2008 by Paul Alan Wyss

Certain colleges and universities require that their academic librarians have an additional advanced subject degree for either being eligible for hire or for continued employment. This paper reviews this topic and examines how using metaphors may help the field of librarianship make sound decisions on this controversial topic.

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According to Mayer and Terrill, (2005, p.59) the literature related to academic librarians and advanced subject degrees is limited and was mainly performed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This should be troubling to the field of academic librarianship, and to the institutions served by academic librarians, as much has changed in the field since then as a result of advances in technology, the increased reliance on the World Wide Web as an information resource, and the distance learning initiatives pursued by an increasing number of universities each year. These changes place a premium on the time librarians have to commit to their daily duties and to their profession. Currently at some, not all, universities there is a paradigm that an advanced degree in a subject specialty other than librarianship imbues the academic librarian who holds it with greater scholarly credibility than one who does not. Also, it is seen as enhancing the status of librarians who work in academia. Whether this paradigm is valid has always been open to question and should now be placed under greater scrutiny given that librarianship has always been a profession with its own terminal degree, the MLS, and that librarians will undoubtedly need to keep abreast of a field of knowledge and discovery within their own profession that will be advancing at an ever quickening rate. It may well be that advanced subject degrees, while valuable in and of themselves, are no longer relevant to the field of librarianship and the question will always remain: were they ever really relevant in the first place? While this paper does not seek to answer that question, it offers an overview of it and a way of using metaphors to view it.

Review of the literature

Herubel (1991, p. 437) states the formal qualifications for an academic librarian are debatable. This is not so. The minimum requirement for an academic librarian is that they hold an American Library Association accredited Master of Library Science Degree (MLS). He also writes that, "If the MLS is generally upheld as the sine qua non for academic, public, and special librarians the value of additional "paper" qualifications is not" Herubel (1991, p. 437). With this in mind, however, Herubel (1991, p. 437) goes on to claim that academic librarians need subject specific graduate degrees in addition to their MLS degree in order to be seen as having scholarly credibility. According to Hembel (1991):

   Graduate education in a subject provides
   useful tools--they may be
   languages, statistics, methodologies--and
   instills a scholarly ethos.
   It is indicative of an intellectual commitment
   to the goals of scholarship
   that the teaching faculty has a right
   to expect of academic librarians (p.
   437).

Herubel sees the "intellectual cachet" of the second advanced degree as being vital to academic librarians being seen as "equal though different" and that they "should go through this rite of passage" (1991, p. 437). What Herubel is alluding to, whether he realizes it or not, is a view proposed by Russell (Russell, 1991, p.16) that states, "Eventually the neophyte so thoroughly internalizes the discourse of the community and, with it, the community' perceptions, assumptions, and behaviors, that she begins to think and act--and write--like a member of the community." While this view may be applicable to undergraduate students it is debatable as to whether it is applicable to professional academic librarians who are not neophytes within their own field.

Herubel's point of view diminishes the library profession as it does not take into account that librarians enable the process of scholarship by understanding and being capable of performing library research for those individuals, faculty or students, who require assistance with it. This type of research, though different that that of a physicist, for example, is nonetheless one of the key components in the scholarly research process and is thus, by its very nature, scholarly. Library research has its underpinnings in the way information and knowledge is categorized, organized, and retrieved by librarians. It requires a supple intellect and experience to perform library research well and this is actually librarianships' "intellectual cachet."

A perspective in contrast to that of Herubel is one promulgated by Jones (1991):

   Intelligence, discrimination, perseverance,
   and knowledge of
   bibliography and the bibliographic
   principles on which libraries are
   organized appear to be characteristics
   possessed by successful
   academic librarians. But there is no
   evidence that another advanced
   degree in a subject specialty would
   help the library school students to
   acquire these characteristics (p. 585).