Educational requirements for a library-oriented career in information management

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

Thus mobility within the field has increased substantially. In fact, not only has mobility increased in terms of changing domains during one's career path, it has also increased in terms of initial job selection. White and Mort (1990) pointed out that nearly half (46 percent) of recent graduates of library and information science programs took their first jobs in areas other than what they thought they were preparing for during their course work. This is a surprising statistic. It is hard to imagine such a high figure in most other fields. Coupling this statistic with Griffiths and King's (1986) data on job changes indicates that, within a half a dozen years of graduation, more than two out of three graduates of schools of library and information science will have worked in an area substantially different from what they thought they were focusing on in their course work.

CONVERGENCE AND THE CRUMBLING OF BOUNDARIES

Another phenomenon referred to earlier is the convergence of fields and disciplines relating to library and information work and the crumbling of the boundaries between them.

LIS and Business Education

As described earlier, schools of library and information science have become, through default, special purpose business schools for the information industry. In addition, however, business schools are themselves becoming far more conscious of the need to address the management of information and information technology. For a spate of reasons, which are too lengthy to review here (but which are well reviewed by Broadbent & Koenig [1988]), the 1980s saw a dramatic burgeoning of interest in information management (a fivefold increase in five years as indicated by articles in the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review [cited in Broadbent & Koenig, 1988]). More and more business schools are initiating programs in information management. The area is ripe for collaboration between schools of library and information science and graduate schools of business. In some cases--for example, Rosary College--that has already happened; at other places, like Western Ontario, it is in the works.

There is also another dimension to this convergence--a technology-driven dimension. As presented by Willner (1991), what a corporate library employer is looking for in new hires has changed and the essence of that change is that the employer now looks for someone not only with technical and professional skills but also with managerial skills. A decade ago, he points out, salary accounted for most of a corporate library's budget. Now, in many libraries, salary is a comparatively small proportion of the budget; the major component is external services and databases. In the case of Shearson-Lehman, he points out, each library employee is, on average, deploying several hundred thousand dollars of the company's resources each year. Those new hires are managing and deploying considerable resources, whether or not they ever thought of themselves as training for a management job.