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

The graduate education recommended by both Williamson and Reece was implemented but, except for isolated attempts, the rest of the scheme was not. Instead, there emerged an oscillating debate, several decades long, about the proper nature of graduate education: should it be practical or theoretical, should it be training statesmen or scholars, humanistic bookmen or information scientists? Given such interminable debate, it is not surprising that the sporadic recommendations and experiments of the next several decades did not have a general effect on education related to library employment.

A course in library assistance was offered by Los Angeles City College in 1937. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Graduate School offered the first library technician program in 1948. In 1949, the Special Libraries Association, in conjunction with the Ballard School of the New York City YWCA, offered a clerical practice course for special libraries. In the same year, Reece (1949) suggests that "the trend of a generation ago to put the training of [library workers] on the graduate level, without discrimination as to the nature of its parts, was a misdirection of effort"(p. 72). Reece again recommends junior college level training for appropriate tasks, and trusts employing libraries to maintain appropriate standards "to prevent bad coin from driving out good" (p. 75).

Also writing in 1949, Clarence Faust, in a moving defense of the need for a liberal education in librarianship, writes: "Looking back over the development of librarianship in this country, one can make out a sequence of shifts running from the conception of the librarian as bookman, through the librarian as technician, to the librarian as administrator" (p. 96).

Erret W. McDiarmid (1949), too, notes that libraries need at least as many support staff as they need librarians. He argues that "the almost complete neglect of the problems involved in training workers below the professional level has resulted in conditions which are very dangerous to the future of librarianship" (p. 232).

McDiarmid suggests that a task requiring some knowledge of library work is not on that basis alone something we should continue to view as the sole province of the professional librarian. He distinguishes nonprofessional duties on the basis of judgment. Nonprofessional duties are those which are "performed according to adopted practice and methods...or under the direction of someone who exercises judgment in deciding how they should be done" (p. 235). His recommendations would deeply involve nonprofessional staff in acquisitions, cataloging, and reference, with training to be provided in a two-year junior college program.

McDiarmid's curriculum for library technicians includes both library techniques and general education. Alice Lohrer, in a discussion of McDiarmid's proposal, urges "a sharp distinction...between a library clerical worker and a subprofessional library assistant," leading to three distinct levels of library employment (McDiarmid, 1949, p. 49).