Educational requirements for a library-oriented career in information management

Library Trends, Fall, 1993 by Michael E.D. Koenig

INTRODUCTION

The central thesis of this article is that the educational requirements for a library-oriented career in information management have changed dramatically in the last decade, not only in the for-profit environment but across the board. This change has, however, been driven to a large degree by developments in the for-profit domain. Library managers and operators can no longer assume, as they have previously, that knowledge of how to operate information systems constitutes virtually the entirety of their required skill set. Now they must know how to create such systems as well. This change in requirements derives from: * an increasing proportion of library-oriented jobs being created

in the corporate and for-profit environment, where creating

information systems for the organization is a fundamental

component of the job function; * the increasing integration of academic, then public, and finally

school libraries into networks is, in fact, the beginning of an

entirely new paradigm of librarianship--the era of library service

as access to the network and the end of the era of the library

as a location. This requires that we build a whole new generation

of systems; * the beginning of the transition from meta-information in electronic

form (the "database" that informed one that there was a print-on-paper

article on the topic) to the information itself, full text, in

electronic form, and increasingly image as well as text data; and * an increasing fluidity and flexibility in career paths.

The consequence of these factors is that education aimed at the design and creation of information systems is now an integral part of the education for librarianship as it never was before.

For a number of converging reasons, the basic educational requirements for a library-oriented career in information management have expanded dramatically. The change can be summarized simply--it is no longer sufficient for such education to focus on the operation of libraries and the provision of information services; it is now requisite that there also be a focus on the design and creation of information systems. This is a dramatic change. Furthermore, that change represents far more than just a major increase in scope; it also represents a culture change, a culture change so profound that it can be described as a true polarity reversal--a polarity reversal from a service orientation to an orientation that is at least as much entrepreneurial as it is service oriented.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

The developments driving this change are several. First, and ultimately the most important, is that the transition from print-on-paper to electronic information tools and systems has fundamentally changed what librarians do. In the print-on-paper world, librarians administered libraries, cataloged books, and provided public service. Library education had to prepare librarians for those functions. Their world was relatively static, and it was one with great duplication of effort, the same item being cataloged nearly simultaneously at many different sites.

With electronic information systems, that situation has changed. Bibliographic utilities have reduced the need for that duplicative cataloging, and librarians' efforts have therefore been able to shift more toward providing access to, and the creation of, new systems.

A more fundamental component of that change from print-on-paper to electronic information systems is that, in the print-on-paper world, the structure and design of an information system, typically a book, was relatively straightforward; one had merely to be exposed to it and one knew about it, tables of contents, back of the book indexes, etc. In "library school," one learned the subtleties of that structure and the rules and techniques of cataloging and indexing.

Now the domain of electronic information systems is both far more complex and extraordinarily more dynamic. How one constructs a CD-ROM database product is a considerably more complex undertaking than designing and planning a book. There are numerous options in terms of data entry or data conversion, data structuring, search engines, and user interface options, for example, plus numerous vendors whose services overlap, complement, and compete with each other in a far more complex environment than that of printing and binding. In addition, those options and those possibilities are all in rapid flux, and the rate of change is only accelerating.

This complexity and this stunning rate of change has important ramifications for education. We can only dimly predict what we will be educating people to cope with only a relatively short period beyond graduation. We are now entering into a third stage of information systems development, a stage which promises to be even more exciting with far more rapid change than what we have been used to for the last twenty years in stage two (Koenig, 1992). The one thing that we can say for certain is that there will be dramatic change. Stage three, characterized by experimental growth of communication capability, has the potential to radically reshape the world of information services to a degree far beyond even the fairly dramatic--at least to our eyes now--changes wrought in stage two by online databases and CD-ROM. The obvious consequence is that we must educate students broadly and conceptually for information about which we can only guess its shape.