Beyond COMPETENCIES: A Trendspotter's Guide to Library Education

Information Outlook, Dec, 1999 by Marion Paris

"Life," John Lennon once philosophized, "is what happens while you are making other plans." It has been over two decades since the president of the University of Oregon announced the imminent closing of his institution's Graduate School of Librarianship. A tired curriculum reflected flagging efforts of faculty who had failed to keep abreast of change. Since then, about one-third of the accredited Master's degree programs that existed in the U.S. in 1978 have either been closed or have been combined with other academic units. For library educators, "other plans" of the past twenty years have had everything to do with survival.

Downsizing, competencies, and vision have been the lingua franca of the nineties. Your persistent indoctrination of management has kept your libraries alive. As if continual upward re-education were not enough, you have taught yourselves to meet demands for increasingly quantitative processes of self-justification; many of you are creating novel means of evaluating your programs and services. Amidst those and other challenges you have assimilated new technologies and devised means of exploiting them, in ways that make you and your libraries even more indispensable.

Juggling the teaching-research-service equation, library educators have been making plans for new programs while continuing to contend with uncertainties imposed upon us by shifting values of higher education. Ever accelerating mission creep is bewildering and unsettling. Grappling with our institutions' priorities has been a vital concern. Our obsessive self-examination may have appeared self-indulgent verging on narcissistic. It is an appropriate time to review what else has been happening in library education--besides what may have called to mind a low-stakes family feud.

Distance Education

Many university administrators believe that across the board, graduate student enrollment is inversely related to economic conditions. Although the effect is less pronounced on law, business, and medical school enrollment, the better the job market, the lower graduate enrollment tends to be. Library education, remarkably, appears to defy the trend, although fewer students are opting for traditional, on-campus graduate study. (Were it not for distance education, that is.) The availability and ultimately the popularity of distance education-in spite of how students, practitioners, and even some faculty really feel about it-has opened the way for more people to gain access to library education than when on-campus study was the norm. Students may choose among Internet courses, interactive video delivered over telephone lines or by satellite; pre-packaged, videotaped lectures; circuit-riding library educators; full-blown branch campus programs; and various combinations of those. De facto de-regulation of library education programs has abrogated state lines. Long-term effects of such unprecedented access to library education are just now emerging as topics for discussion. Identifying and claiming turf, choosing among resources (Do we send a faculty member or is the site configured for video?), and funding improved modes of delivery have been intermediate concerns. Arguably those issues are inconsequential when measured against demographics and ongoing changes in librarianship itself.

Accreditation

LIS programs are less likely to resemble one another than they once did when a "one size fits all" approach was the norm. Today's rubrics, the American Library Association's 1992 Standards for Accreditation, acknowledge the multifarious influences that mission, students, constituency, and parent institution exert in shaping the character of an academic program. Accreditation in general is a flash point in higher education these days. Faculty and administrators-even and especially certain vice presidents and presidents--have questioned whether advantages conferred by accreditation can justify ever-mounting costs associated with the process. Anecdotes about teams' being asked to leave campus partway through visits or not being invited at all are no longer exceptional. The goals and purposes of accreditation of LIS programs are being scrutinized, even though the National Commission on Accreditation of Teachers of Education (NCATE) and regional accrediting bodies (the North Central Association, for example) have not yet officially joined the debate. By their unprecedented tolerance of innovativeness and creativity, shapers of the 1992 Standards unwittingly may have hoisted themselves on their own petards. Officials of the University of California (Berkeley) announced in 1998 that they would not seek ALA accreditation for the Master's degree program. Whether Berkeley will seek re-accreditation in the future is unclear, which begs the question, why? Keith Swigger's proposals for alternate means of delivery make more sense than some of the schemes being employed to keep library education programs afloat.

What if the Texas State Library were to ask the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for degree-granting authority? What if the American Library Association went into the library education business, and instead of accrediting [sic] schools, simply accredited itself? [ldots] What if Lexis-Nexis or Microsoft decided to start offering educational programs instead of the introductory training and continuing education programs they present now?," [1]