Beyond COMPETENCIES: A Trendspotter's Guide to Library Education

Information Outlook, Dec, 1999 by Marion Paris

Where Have All the Library Educators Gone?

Similarly, within the next five years, some of you may wonder what has happened to the library school faculty members who once were active in SLA. Some of us will be on mountaintops or ensconced in beach houses. Perhaps, we will have started our own businesses or will live in a developing nation, helping libraries grow. In a study they conducted in 1989, Elizabeth Futas and Fay Zipkowitz warned us that the mean age of library educators then was a shade above fifty.3 Futas and Zipkowitz also pointed out that we are not reproducing ourselves. The concluding cohort of generalists-leading-edge boomers or a bit older, who came of age in the 1960s and at one time taught from five to seven different courses per year--are now senior faculty. Many of our new colleagues are specialists from the outset, highly trained and highly desirable researchers, cognizant of the academic pecking order and its reward system. Shifting faculty priorities are bound to color education programs. At the 1999 ALISE meeting (library educa tors' annual job market) the number of positions almost doubled the number of persons seeking jobs. Whither faculty participation in SLA?

Moreoever, despite the widespread unwillingness (even among library educators) to admit it, the following paraphrases many an administrator's mantra: "everything you do has value, but you will be rewarded monetarily for creating and disseminating new knowledge." Translation: spend as much time as you wish working with SLA; you will earn your salary increase by publishing.

Continuing Education

The Medical Library Association has led the way in requiring continuing education. SLA members who hold membership in the Association of Records Managers and Administrators have acquired new knowledge (and a different perspective) from that organization. A fortunate few among you have attended American Management Association seminars or university-sponsored advanced management programs. Conversely some SLA chapters have attempted to provide CE on a shoestring. By calling upon local expertise, SLA chapters distant from urban areas have made remarkable efforts in that direction. If you have a library school nearby, you may have looked to faculty for CE or pro bono consulting.

It is time to 'fess up: good continuing education costs money. Will you choose to pay? Either way you will pay. Discussions of "professionalism" will give rise to a range of discussion that one person cannot predict. Count on it, though, to include education and educators, certification, competencies, demographics, dumbing down, LS versus IS, the "L-Word," value of the degree, salaries as prohibitions to recruiting "promising" people, the role professional associations--a range of provocative conversation. Our recruits are promising: perhaps it is we, by disparaging the "L-Word" and continuing our internecine bickering, who have failed at modeling professional self-respect.

We have passed through the information age; or it passed us by, sometime in the 1980s. In the aggregate we have been unduly tolerant of the dreamy, abstract thinking (Neronian musicianship?) that has brought forth platitudes in place of priorities, least common denominators instead of bottom lines.