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January 2000
THE LIBRARY PROFESSION AND PROFESSIONAL VALUES Dr G E Gorman, Regional Editor, Library Link Introduction Anyone with a passion for libraries and those who serve as librarians cannot help but be profoundly uneasy about certain trends in our profession. Writing as an educator of librarians, one of the best examples to me of this change is the way in which "library" or "librarianship" has all but disappeared from the names of most departments or schools of LIS. My previous university had a School of Information Studies, which resided in the Faculty of Science and Agriculture, and it offered a Master of Applied Science as a first professional qualification for librarians - no mention of "library" anywhere there. In my present university the situation is little better - librarianship has disappeared into a School of Communications and Information Management in a Faculty of Commerce and Administration, where at least we do still offer a Master of Library and Information Studies. Some see this disappearance as only natural, arguing that LIS has enjoyed such low status in the academic pecking order that we have been forced to align ourselves with other, higher profile disciplines. Yet what sort of profile do agriculturalists have in academe, and what respect is accorded to accountancy as a profession in any institution worthy of the name "university"? There is something sadly amiss in the argument that making librarians like some other, often suspect, profession or psycho-phantasmagoric pseudo-profession such as the ubiquitous and rather meaningless one of "management" will be good for this long-established profession to which we ascribe. Nevertheless, it has been happening for some time and in many places, from the UK to China, from the US to Australia. As the traditional and entirely honourable professional title of "librarian" is replaced by the neutral, homogenised term, "information professional", what is the result of this change in nomenclature? This is the first issue that the present paper seeks to address. Of course, not all library schools have felt it necessary to make such a change, and some (few) of the world�s great centres for the education of librarians proudly retain "library" in their titles - the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, for example, or the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. Leigh Estabrook, Dean of the latter institution, has gone on record in support of retaining "library" as part of her School�s title: We remain the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and award one degree for the completion of LIS studies. Why? Because our faculty believes fundamentally in the core aspects of librarianship - organising and making information accessible, service to our users - and the importance of these basic concepts in any type of job that our students take, both in and out of libraries. At heart, "information specialists" need to have the same knowledge about and concern for information organisation and access long cherished by the people we traditionally call "librarians".[1] Estabrook and her colleagues clearly respect the tradition of librarianship and rightly recognise that information professionals of all persuasions, even the laughably termed "knowledge managers", will need to have similar, or even identical, core concerns as librarians. These core concerns tend to be reflected in the curricula of more traditional library schools, but increasingly we are questioning these core concerns as we seek to interpret "librarian" for a range of emerging markets, whether information officers or records managers. As we ask these questions, we need to reflect on the underlying goal, the raison d�etre, of our profession. This is the second issue that this paper seeks to address. To deal adequately with both principal issues, we must go back to basics. In particular we need to understand what is meant by "professionalism" and how the attributes of professionalism affect librarianship. Professionalism and Librarianship We begin by considering where librarianship stands at the start of a new millennium, and where better to start than with the aptly named Project Century 21: Examining Librarians' Role in Information Delivery, an undertaking of the American Library Association. A background paper to Project 21 by McCook reviews the concept of "professional jurisdiction" and bases its observations on the "fundamental belief that the tasks of information professionals are oriented toward a substantive set of values".[2] These values assume information provision to be a basic human need in a democratic society, which of course is something alien to many states outside the world�s developed, and largely democratic, nations. It also has to be recognised that safeguarding the values that ensure access to information is no longer the professional responsibility solely of librarians, if it ever was. Nevertheless, it is this assumption of McCook�s that underlies the discussion in this paper. Changing Contexts for Librarians In "Professionalism and the Future of Librarianship" Andrew Abbott describes three contexts in which the work of librarians is likely to change:
The second context, other professions, will most likely result in a continuing vertical differentiation wherein a core professional elite is concerned with "maintaining the increasingly centralised knowledge and physical resources of librarianship - algorithms, databases, indexing systems, repositories - and a larger but peripheral group provides actual client access to these resources".[5] This has, indeed, long been the case in our profession and needs to be a focus of the examination of its future. That is, will the activation of resources for equity of access to information be a more central focus of education for librarians in the next century? Abbot�s third context, other ways of providing expertise, looks at the reality that expertise can be an organisational attribute as distinct from a characteristic of individual professionals. Accordingly, the centralisation and privatisation of large databases, as well as more conscious and direct educational expenditures of commercial organisations, may change the focal point of information work. Librarianship, though, has within itself a saving feature - it is, in Abbott�s view, a "federated profession" that can adapt to changes in work and organisation more effectively than a specialised profession such as medicine. While a federated profession gives up absolute credential closure, monopoly of service and personal autonomy, it also has certain advantages:
Abbott�s ideas have a specific focus for librarians in a 1998 paper by Richard Danner, which focuses on law librarianship and includes a summary of the American Association of Law Librarians� Special Committee on the Renaissance of Law Librarianship final report.[7] This report lists eight elements essential to the profession�s knowledge base:
One of Danner's more resonant observations is that the "ability to provide context to the client's process of information seeking will be the key to the future of the information profession".[9] This expertise in human elements of the information-seeking process and the content of information, according to Danner, must be underpinned by tool building to ensure that content is accessible in ways that are meaningful to users.[10] Legitimisation of Librarianship as a Profession Occupational sociologists often contribute meaningfully to the debate about professionalism. Among these is Rossides, who examines social power, the nature of knowledge and the knowledge professions in a discussion of what he regards as the fiction of a knowledge society.[11] He relies heavily on the writings of Michel Foucault, who argues that knowledge comes from discourse and that the knowledge claims of the professions are arbitrary and appear objective only to the extent that they have power behind them.[12] Rossides characterises librarians as gaining professional status from linking their activities to important social functions (education, for example).[13] Knowledge as a core feature of professionalism is discussed in nearly all sociological analyses of the professions.[14] MacDonald, for example, argues that professions can be classed according to whether their cognitive basis is scientific or normative. The influence of any profession is a function of this cognitive basis. Those professions like librarianship that derive legitimacy from both bases are regarded as having a "syncretistic epistemological foundation". MacDonald then goes on to discuss dimensions (similar to Abbott's contexts). The first is the continuum of technical and moral authority; the second is institutional context; the third is professional organisations.[15] Professionalisation is placed in global perspective by Harold Perkin, who examines the provenance and character of professional elites - their success in establishing dominance in the world of the professional expert.[16] Modern knowledge-based services built on advanced education and enhanced by technology have shifted the focus of power and influence. However, policy is not made by a technical elite, but by the corporate managers and government bureaucrats who employ them. Perkin submits that the elite professions are in a position to lead post-industrial society in service to the international community or to allow the world to sink into corruption, conflict and self-destruction.[17] Thus if librarianship is truly a profession, its practitioners will move to activate the professional principles that enable free access to information. They will provide service to the world community in this manner. Applying Professionalism in Librarianship These writers and others like them help us position librarianship within a framework of issues relating to professionalism in general. Librarianship, after all, has strong moral authority inherent in its normative orientation. As librarians support intellectual freedom, literacy and free access to information in societies where this is possible, we do so from a basis of moral authority. The two professions most often identified as the models toward which all others strive are medicine and law. The goal of medicine is healing. The goal of law is justice. Librarianship has a simple and clear goal as well - information equity. Inherent in this goal is working for universal literacy, defending intellectual freedom, preserving and making accessible the human record, and ensuring that all people have access to information. This idea has been argued eloquently in Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness, and Reality by Walter Crawford and Michael Gorman, in which the authors note:
remember that human service to human beings and communities is the prime reason for a library to exist; recognise that knowledge and understanding, not data and information, are the central concerns of libraries; defend the central ethical concerns of librarianship - equality of access to materials and resources, service, co-operation, and intellectual freedom; take pride in the way libraries and librarians have honoured their mission and accept the weight of that mission.[18] Standards and Principles of Librarianship A considerable amount of what we have been saying in the preceding sections has been addressed and codified in various collective deliberations of the library profession. And these deliberations, usually emanating from US library bodies, often cast new light on information equity, which we identify as a core professional principle. One example of this may be seen in Information Power: Building a Partnership for Learning.[19] This book builds on numerous guidelines from the American Library Association that have encouraged improvements in school library media programmes. Even a cursory analysis of these guidelines and of Information Power show a strong commitment to information equity and free access to information. The same may be said of Planning for Results: A Public Library Transformation Process.[20] This new planning process for public libraries derives from decades of efforts by public librarians to establish service standards and guidelines. If Ross Atkinson�s view is correct, then academic librarianship has a particularly difficult challenge in defining its role. Either the academic library community agrees on its core contributions, and then takes whatever steps are necessary to ensure that it is able to continue to make such contributions in online circumstances, or the academic library needs to accept and resign itself to the fact that it is primarily a product of a waning information environment and should neither expect nor prepare to continue to play a major role in higher education or scholarly information exchange.[21] One response to this challenge has been issued in the US by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which has established the Billy E. Frye Digital Leadership Institute to "effect change in the way universities manage their information resources in the digital era."[22] In a similar vein the Association of College and Research Libraries in the US has recently issued its Guidelines for University Undergraduate Libraries, which seek to promote an effective learning environment.[23] In other countries the efforts have been less sustained and of more recent vintage, but there are many international examples of collective efforts to build professionalism in librarianship, including some sterling work by IFLA and FID. Also, in the UK The Library Association has been active in this regard, as has the Canadian Library Association, the Australian Library and Information Association, the Library and Information Association of New Zealand (though to a lesser extent) and similar professional bodies in many developing countries. Taken together, these efforts suggest an international convergence on the principal themes of equity and access. Additionally, the American Library Association has issued numerous position and public policy statements that define professional values of librarianship. These include:
Similarly, various professional associations of librarians in the US have issued documents relating to education for the library profession. These include the American Library Association�s Standards for Accreditation of Master�s Programmes in Library and Information Studies, the Special Libraries Association�s Competencies for Special Librarians of the 21st Century and the American Association of Law Libraries� AALL Guidelines for Graduate Programmes in Law Librarianship.[25] This is an impressive body of work intended to activate information equity, to find means to include people of all ages, ethnicity and economic levels to share in the world's information resources. Librarianship - an Evolving Profession The question of whether a new profession is emerging faces all professions as we begin a new millennium, and there appears to be an emerging consensus that for many professions a multidisciplinary cross-professionalism is likely to become normative. As Collens maintains in relation to education for a number of professions (including law, medicine, business, engineering and accountancy), "we need to teach our students to draw knowledge from across professional boundaries". I would describe people who have interprofessional capability as �Renaissance professionals�.[26] This certainly applies to librarianship, which in its very origins has been derivative of other social sciences and which continues to draw on any discipline which contributes to its professionalism. Enduring traditions and present norms must incorporate ideas from all relevant disciplines in service of the goals of the library profession. It may be that the redesigning and renaming of professional education for librarians has left our academic colleagues feeling bemused or confused, and quite justifiably so. If this is so, then what do members of the public understand about our profession? One shudders to think. We need desperately to clarify not only for our academic colleagues but also for the public which uses our services exactly where we are going as a profession, and why. As we have suggested in the preceding discussion, perhaps the most viable avenue for the library profession is to build sensibly on our past record, adding to it where appropriate initiatives from other professions and emerging technologies. A prime example of how this might be done lies in current work by the Council on Library and Information Resources in the USA. For example, Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation carefully analyses technical problems of long-term digital preservation within a framework of information equity.[27] In the final analysis, the evidence from this and similar initiatives around the world suggests that the only truly new feature of our profession is the adoption and development of new technologies to serve our goal of information equity. If there is a new dimension to the professional practice of librarianship, it is to be found in our policy involvement. The major trends of modern professional society - a professional society in which librarians should be full participants - as identified by Perkin are:
A new profession is not emerging; rather librarianship is continuing to evolve as it has done for centuries. It will evolve in a more focused way if educators of librarians and library professionals work together in bringing new technologies into service for our professional goal of information equity. The university departments where we work and study may choose not to have "library" in their names, but the profession as it is practised remains librarianship pure and simple. Long may this continue. References
Dr G E Gorman
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