Wednesday night's colloquium featured Dan O'Connor as moderator, and Pat Reeling and David Carr as guest speakers. The topic of this meeting was library education, where we've been and where we're going.
Pat Reeling is a professor here at Rutgers' SCILS, and is also president of the New Jersey chapter of the American Association of University Professors. She came to Rutgers from Columbia in 1967 and became interested in Library Education and history through working on a book with Mary Gaver, then a professor at the library school.
Although Rutgers' MLS program is the only ALA-accredited program in New Jersey, Professor Reeling pointed out that Glassboro-Rowan has a program that is recognized by the state. In addition, other schools in New Jersey (such as William Paterson) have granted four-year or Master's degree programs in Library Studies. Despite this, however, library education is a late-comer in New Jersey. The more prestigious programs were at Pratt, Drexel, and Columbia and Professor Reeling, unimpressed with "the library" as Alexander was then called, decided to study at Columbia. A lot has changed since, though, and Professor Reeling stressed the power of a few dedicated and politically-connected people in leading this change. In 1900 a Public Library Commission was established to bring library services to smaller rural communities. A problem was that these smaller libraries could seldom afford the upscale Pratt or Drexel graduate, and so there was a call for local training programs. Summer, in-house programs started in Asbury Park in 1906, and the tuition and books were free so long as the student was employed by a New Jersey library. This developed into a certificate program and remarkably enough, many of the courses that were taught at that time have modern counterparts today, for example, Book Selection (our Collection and Development), Administration (our Management courses), Storytelling, Children's Literature, Library Work as a Profession, Government Documents, and Cataloguing.
The next phase of library education's history was a nasty battle between the summer programs and "extension courses," much like the dispute between traditional and distance education today. The summer programs soon died. At the same time, the American Library Association began to establish educational guidelines, recommending four years of liberal arts study and one year of library studies toward a BLS in Library Studies. At the New Jersey College for women (now Douglass), Dean Douglass was an advocate for dignified, professional programs for women. She approached ALA with the idea of starting up a Library Studies program and got it going in 1927. Two years later, the depression hit, and this program was desperately poor. Similarly, the free summer programs ended. Again, dedicated individuals stepped to the fore. The two remaining library studies professors at the New Jersey College for Women, Ethel Fair and Alice Higgins kept the school going and accepted half-salaries.
More changes occurred in the 1940's with the conclusion of World War II. The GI Bill allowed many returning soldiers to get an education, and a push was made to include men in the program at NJCW. After years of wrangling, men were allowed to take classes. At the same time, practitioners were demanding that the educational requirement be elevated to a Masters' degree. The State of New Jersey appropriated $50,000 for a master's program at Rutgers. University President Mason Gross, whose wife was taking classes in the program, hired Lowell Martin, a careful planner, as the first dean of the new library school (1953-1958). The second dean, Ralph Shaw, wanted to make it the best program in the school, and propelled everyone to produce. Their input in the hiring process of subsequent faculty has been terribly important, influencing what we learn in our classes today. Throughout her talk, Professor Reeling emphasized that the quality of the program at Rutgers has gone up and down with the abilities, ideas, and motivation of the dean, making all the more important our current concern about the new dean SCILS is in the process of hiring.
Professor David Carr also emphasized the need for quality in the new dean. Particularly, Carr would like to see a "learning dean" come to SCILS, feeling that library education should contribute to independent learning. This process involves choosing what you'll learn, as well as acquiring design and critical thinking skills. Professor Carr especially highlighted design, the use of our imaginations in approaching an information problem. Bibliographic work can always be newly interpreted, extended, or redone, and to approach new problems our minds have to expand in ways that they may not have before.
Professor Carr has many expectations for our future which may promise to be both amazing and overwhelming. First, he sees that there will be a voluminous increase in the information message that we receive, especially through e-mail, and that these will be more relevant to us since they are sent to us personally. Also, they will be aimed at us over a distance, say, from friends around the country. The mass of this information will become a problem, and librarians will be the mediators of this information and communication. Second, more people will have relationships with information because it is become such a part of our daily lives. The only way it is avoidable is if one makes the conscious choice to cut him or herself off from it. Third, information will become more fragmented, will present itself in pieces. Much of it will be really shallow in meaning unless we choose to dive deep. When we do, we'll find it to be voluminous and hard to navigate through. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the challenges that we will meet are not those of technology but of cognition. This is a focus not on machines but human beings. There is the problem of finding what we need to grasp in order to pay close attention to it (dive deep), but we also have to have a feel for all that's possible (this relates to imagination as the tool for expanding our thinking). In summary, some adjectives that describe our modern information environment are: partial, immeasurable, in process, superficial, instantaneous, in motion, unfinished, tentative. But real knowing is complex. Similarly, our education is incomplete and only potentially useful. We require imagination to tap into our knowledge and apply it in new ways that we might not have been taught.
For Professor Carr, our profession involves particularly three difficult elements. First, there is theory. The current theory is that efficiency, speed, and the bottom line have set the tone of our culture of information. Yet, in order that both we and our users can grasp and pay attention to what is important, we have to slow this pace down. A second factor is morality. We have to view our profession as improving the quality of the lives of our users, as giving the gift of a transaction that could be life-changing. This requires us to view information as only important in the context of human lives, bringing into our work an added consideration beyond learning how to use certain books and resources. Thirdly, being a librarian encompasses the tension of the artist, a person who is trying to articulate the unknown among ambiguity. We must draw on our skills of imagination and design to answer questions that we have previously never been asked.
Professor Carr underscored that services should stay at the center of our degree. Particularly, we need to ask how our work rescues the user. It is not about the mastery of tools but the ability to think. He urges us to encounter ourselves repeated and make choices, even bad one, because this helps us make decisions in the presence of an unknown. The paradox of trying to find an unknown that we recognize the instant we see it is at the heart of our profession. We also need to be able to reflect on bits of information and sew them together, as well as to stand up for the user, to consider how this helps him or her.
Professor Carr also discussed briefly some new things that are happening in our program. For one, the "service" in SCILS has been changed to "science" this year. This was done for several reasons. Professor Varlejs explained it as a way to mark off our turf from the computer science discipline. Another consideration was the fact that many other MLS programs are called "science" and some graduates were disappointed about their being affiliated with "service" instead. Professor Carr also mentioned certain international themes developing in our program, involving new, international professors as well as internships overseas for our students. He also would like to see more places for SCILS students and faculty to learn with and from each other, in addition to connecting our curriculum to classes in Douglass College and at Mason Gross.
In the ensuing question and answer period, a key topic was the value of learning interpersonal skills as part of our curriculum. Another point of discuss was the difference between simply making the user happy versus giving him or her what he or she needs.
These notes might seem sketchy, but I think that the point of it all was to get us to think about who we are as librarians and what we think we should be--- plying that imagination so important to Professor Carr. I'd love to hear any reactions you all might have to reading this. Again, I hope that I haven't misrepresented anyone, though I admit that I probably haven't typed all that was said with the same grace evinced by Professor Reeling and Professor Carr. As always, please feel free to add or correct. I hope you find this useful.