About Competencies
One of the persistent trails worn through my greenroo space since 1999 has been the question of "core competencies," in particular "core competencies" to be expected of the newly-graduated, "generalist" librarian of the future. So,I was particularly happy to see "Skills for the 21st Century Librarian" from Meredith Farkas. In what is, I suspect, very 20th century behavior, I printed it off and read it when I had the time and space to do it justice -- on the long train ride home at night.
Looking at Meredith's list from the perspective of someone who's interviewed and hired in a variety of organizations and contexts, it's a great list. Project management is, in my experience, an undervalued and necessary skill in many environments. Then, there's the matter of keeping up with both technology and librarianship, the ability to sell your ideas and your library's services, and.... Yes! This is a good list. The comments on this post -- and Karen Schneider's interesting follow-up post over at Free Range Librarian have added interesting dimensions and shadings. Ryan Deschamps in his provocative July 24 post at The Other Librarian took the discussion in what I think is an interesting direction.
ALA's Committee on Accreditation and Committee on Education will both be continuing to explore this area over the next year or so. There have been a couple of drafts developed (check here -- and here) and another is on the way. As documents are posted, I'll point to them in this space. This is an important conversation -- and one that needs many voices and perspectives. This is a great start. Please continue the conversation.
Following this conversation has caused me to reflect on my own library education and post-MLS process of becoming a librarian. I always have a certain reluctance to talk about my own experience -- in part because, as I said to Michael Stephens when we first met, it's too easy to fall into the infamous "we walked six miles, uphill both ways" trap. Still, this is a conversation that has caused me to reflect on when and how I began to think of myself as a librarian.
In the interests of full disclosure, I was not a wonderful LIS student -- mostly average, still auditing history classes on the side, and too frequently arguing with the dean (Lawrence Clark Powell -- at UCLA). My MLS was conferred in 1965 -- and the change since then has been amazing, beyond what I could have foreseen. Specifics I learned largely on the job -- partly because I hadn't paid overmuch attention in class, partly because that's where many of those details needed to be learned, partly because those details began changing about 24 hours after I got my degree. And yet.... In some important and enduring ways my experience in the LIS program at UCLA both set my feet on a particular career path -- into early library automation -- and laid down the essential foundation on which I could become a librarian.
While I argued with the dean, the bookman's course on western Americana provided a clear window into the continuity and complexity of collections and collecting. While the subsequent specifics changed -- punched cards anyone? -- Bob Hayes' course on library systems analysis shaped my approach to work, in libraries and elsewhere -- and still does. From Lubetzky's cataloging course I took a sense of reasons and principles behind the code -- though I had to go back and actually study the details post-MLS, when I discovered I actually need to know them, having spent too many of the cataloging course hours secretly (I think) reading other stuff. Some courses contributed to lifelong habits, like the conviction -- about which my reference professor felt strongly -- that you must read the daily paper before beginning your day's work at the reference desk. I still do, before beginning work at any desk -- though my career as a reference librarian was short-lived.
So -- did that MLS make me a librarian? I think not -- but it made it possible for me to become one. The becoming was the work of practice in libraries and elsewhere, of conversation -- and sometimes argument -- with colleagues and mentors, of reading and studying about the issues that a changing field presented, of trial -- and no small amount of error. First I was in positions labeled "librarian" -- then one day I realized that as I thought about my own identity, I thought "librarian." I came to see myself as a member of a community that practiced librarianship -- tied together by many shared values, shared vocabulary and ways of approaching problems, shared history and memory. It has now been 20 years or so since I last worked within any organization called a "library," in a position labeled "librarian" -- and yet that remains a major portion of my identity: librarian -- and still working on fully becoming.
Doing some background reading for a panel presentation this next weekend, I picked up James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In it he says that "...an academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain...is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these social practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, acting, and, often, writing and reading." It's an interesting book, one I'm still thinking through.
