Educational requirements for a library-oriented career in information management

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

THE GROWTH OF INFORMATION INDUSTRY EMPLOYMENT

A parallel development is the increasing role of library and information science education in preparing for employment in the information industry. In the era of print-on-paper, the world of publishing, as the information industry was then known, required no formal training or education. A good belles-lettres degree was all that was expected. Books or journals were items with which all were familiar, and the parameters and economics of their production could be quickly learned. With current and future information technology, that is no longer the case. Putting together a CD-ROM product is not easy or straightforward. There are numerous decisions to be made about vendors, data conversion, search engines, and display formats, some of which require, and all of which are made easier by, a knowledge of information technology and data design. Furthermore, the technology is changing rapidly, and the new technology and its applications and capabilities can be understood and appreciated far more rapidly by those who also possess a solid grounding in the area of information technology.

The consequence of these developments is that the traditional route of entry into what has become the information industry is no longer very satisfactory. The products of schools of library and information science are far better educated and trained to step into jobs where they will have to be dealing with the sorts of issues hinted at earlier.

The industry has discovered the utility of hiring graduates of schools of library and information science. This education has stretched, not without some complaint from the traditionalists, to accommodate this new role of serving as a special purpose graduate school of business to the information industry. The stretch, however, has not in fact been that large. What is needed for information industry jobs, in fact, overlaps greatly with what is needed in modern libraries and information centers, particularly libraries and information centers in the corporate world.

One result of this development is to impel library and information science education toward a more international orientation, for the information industry is inherently international, which in turn derives from the fact that information, the commodity, is inherently international. With conventional manufactured economic goods, there is a trade-off point at which it is cheaper to build--e.g., automobiles--locally than it is to pay the costs of shipping them. With information goods, the cost of creation is high (what the publishing industry refers to as the "first copy cost"), and the cost of duplication and distribution is very modest, almost trivial by comparison. Once one has a Chemical Abstracts database in Columbus, Ohio, it is sold worldwide; it makes no sense (economically speaking) to duplicate it in Europe or Japan. Similarly, the Derwent database in the United Kingdom or the Beilstein database in Germany are sold internationally and not duplicated elsewhere. There is a spectrum of economic goods, from low value and high shipping/ transmission costs per unit (such as cement) at one end, to high value and low shipping/transmission costs (such as microelectronic devices and printed information products). As information products move increasingly from print-on-paper to electronic media, they are moving even more to the latter end of the spectrum, indeed even extending that end of the spectrum.