Educational requirements for a library-oriented career in information management

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

Librarianship was justifiably proud of its service orientation. It defined itself to a degree by that orientation and took pride in the fact that it was not a business school. Now library schools are being required by the changes in employment opportunities to not only serve the traditional community, but to serve as a special purpose business school as well. For many, this is a bitter pill to swallow. In one case, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that one school of library and information science even chose to treat it as a suicide pill (Haywood, 1991).

The author was made personally aware of how dramatic that change has been when, a few years ago, he served on an eight member search committee for the dean of the School of Library Service at Columbia University. The experience can perhaps best be described as closely akin to serving on a search, committee for the dean of a divinity school--but a completely schizophrenic search committee in which half of the members thought they were looking for the dean of an aggressively nondenominational divinity school--e.g., Yale, and whose important selection criteria were a candidate's commitment to open scholarly inquiry and the marketplace of ideas, the candidate's own research and scholarly merit, and the candidate's administrative and fund-raising skills--and where the denomination of the candidate, whether Congregationalist, or Shiite, or Dominican, or Reformed was largely immaterial. By contrast, the other half of the members of the search committee thought that they were looking for the dean of a rigidly sectarian divinity school--perhaps one like Oral Roberts University--and that the candidacy of no one but a demonstrated true believing member of that sect could be entertained. A candidate with a background in the information industry was absolute anathema to that half of the committee.

Indeed, the demise of the School of Library Science at Columbia can be quite simply described as the conflict between a university administration who had given the school a mandate to become a Yale and a tenured faculty who were committed to retaining the school as the Oral Roberts of schools of library and information science, supported, or at least not challenged, by their dean.

The point made is that it is proving to be very difficult to change the cultures of schools of library and information science--so difficult that the School of Library Science of Columbia committed what Haywood (1991, p. 48) described as "communal Hari-Kari" rather than adapt to that polarity reversal. The senior faculty preferred to fly the old flag of "service orientation" in solitary splendor on the masthead and go down with the ship rather than run up alongside it the new flag of "entrepreneurship and the international marketplace" and be assured of smooth sailing.

RAMIFICATIONS

The ramifications for library and information science education are generally rather clear, but they are not so easily implemented--as the case of the School of Library Science at Columbia University illustrates.