Educating and training library practitioners: a comparative history with trends and recommendations - includes appendix on history of library education

At the community college training level, experience and intent may well differ. Rabago (1994), for example, quotes a student who would like "as much as another year of practical skills application" (p. 14). Many of the community college programs avowedly emphasize practical skills--for all levels of employees.

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION SCIENCE IN LIBRARY EDUCATION

While much of the history of librarianship has been preoccupied with combining a broadly humanistic background with developing clerical and retrieval techniques in, often, the same person, there has been in recent decades an increasing call for an intellectual base that can stand on its own rights. While automation may have forced the issue, the need has been seen as a need to unify practice and theory--aside, really, from the humanistic knowledge and value set of traditional librarianship. Kaplan (1965) writes:

The intellectual foundation for library science must be in this group

of metasciences--logic, linguistics, mathematics, theory of information,

and so on .... not because they underlie... technology... but

for an intellectual reason, because there is central to them the concept

of structure, of order, of form, which seems to me to be the

central concern of library science....Either you are interested in order,

structure, form or you are interested in substance and content;

and in the latter case you must resign yourself to mastering some

increasingly narrow subject area and to doing whatever you can in

the course of that work as little assistants or magic helpers or something

of the kind to the people working in that area. (pp. 8-9)

In the view of a number of leaders, information science is what will bring the profession to full flower. Robert Hayes (1965) suggests "system design as the crucial concept of information science" and "information science [as] the theoretical discipline of librarianship and library science as the professional one" (p. 52).

With information science behind them, librarians need no longer be mere "little assistants or magic helpers" to people doing real work. Writing in Wired about the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, Brian Caulfield (1997) sees the new director's view as one where, "like the primates who escape from subservience in Planet of the Apes," we will have librarians "crawling out from behind their card catalogs to rule the global datasphere." Caulfield sees Hal Varian, the school's director, as "the ideal spokesman for the new wave in library schools." No little helpers these, "there will be a larger role for people who organize, filter, and locate information .... This is no longer a library school .... This is a new school to train people for new job markets." Information managers will become ubiquitous. "In any organization, someone is going to have to do it" (Caulfield, 1997, p. 64). Varian's librarians will of course be outside the library.

Many librarians still have reservations about "these newly wired M.L.S. androids .... Do you want one of these technocrats facing your public?" (Manley, 1986a, p. 35). Manley decries the tendency of systems people to "translate all human endeavors into the language of electronic circuit schematics.., perplexing problems...routinely diagrammed as though they were simple declarative sentences" (p. 35). We note further that it is an experienced librarian who suggests courses in photocopiers, deviant behavior, and recycling as covering the skills actually in demand at the work sites (Cole, 1993, p. 57).