John Berry’s opinion piece on the Vanishing Librarians has created a tornado of hot air on JESSE, a discussion list for educators in LIS. Most are reacting to his trotting out of the tired argument about LIS schools being ‘invaded’ by faculty from other disciplines, using it as a launch pad for some ill-informed attacks on new information tools and knee-jerk defenses of some imagined glorious past when an LIS degree was pure. Most of this seems a mis-reading of Berry’s piece which I interpret is an attack on what he views as the deskilling of library professionals at the hands of managers, vendors and an a lazy public more satisfied with Amazon than they have any right to be (apparently), with a pro-forma dig at the LIS world added for good measure. In the battle between logic and emotion, there is usually only one outcome and while it is apparently easy to blame the LIS programs and their faculty for this state of affairs, Berry’s piece suggests he is really criticizing the leaders of libraries for dumbing down services and jobs. Canute-like protestations are not unusual in this world but it’s clear the desire for libraries as bastions of education above all, and at all costs, lives on among those who never have to pay the costs.
My own students raised this in class last week and I attempted to show them that skills are not the same as labels, and arguing about the label rather than the skills would not provide much insight, but it might make you feel better. After all, being disgruntled and hiding behind the line that one is just an old-fashioned standard-bearer is a cheap rhetorical device long beloved of those who don’t want to deal with change. Librarians are not vanishing but I suspect the idea of what constitutes a librarian is now less in agreement among employers, educators, and professionals than at any time in the recent past. Berry does raise a valid point though since the data from recent labor studies I heard at ALISE suggested the largest growth in employment within libraries was for positions filled by people without ALA-accredited degrees. Perhaps the employers need to weigh in more on this. Is it just possible that some programs are not producing the right level of professional, or that some graduates care more about the credential than the education? Perhaps LIS programs are to blame after all, but not in the way most people have concluded.