RSSThoughts on Completing Library School by Matt Haugen
Feb 04
From Our Guest Bloggers Graduate School, Information Science, Library School, Library Science, MLS, Palmer School 1 Comment
As the ink is still drying on my MLS degree, I feel somewhat at a loss for experience or perspectives worth sharing with an audience that includes more seasoned librarians. At this early benchmark in my career as a librarian, I don’t feel that I’ve just now crossed a mystical threshold into a community of “official” librarians. The largely part-time, evening-and-weekend class format of library school left me without a strong sense of cohort with my fellow graduates; I’m sure I will not be alone in skipping commencement services this May, nor do I imagine sales of library school class rings, yearbooks, or letter jackets will be very high. After graduation, few of us display our degrees, wear our academic garb, or follow our signatures with “MLS”. Furthermore, many of us had worked in libraries for some time before even starting library school. My early work experience is what led me to apply to library school in hopes of a more stable career and better salaries, but in some cases I feel like I learned more actual procedural knowledge and skills through on-the job experience than I did in library school. The MLS is a standard credential for job qualifications, and probably leads to greater professional clout and stability, but it otherwise the status an MLS affords seems somewhat hazy. So, with the amount of time and money we’ve spent on library school in the face of a slim job market, it’s worth asking: “What’s the point?”
Surely, if it were just for love of books and for a desire to help people find them, I could just as easily have continued as a library worker without completing the MLS; I could have even worked at a bookstore, and I am sure I would be as capable of developing many of the necessary procedural and technical skills without needing a graduate degree to do so. I suspect that those of us who chose libraries over bookstores did so for a reason, but In the day-to-day work of libraries, it can be easy to forget what those reasons were. I’d risk sounding like an editorial for American Libraries if I wrote a manifesto about about the grand philosophy that grounds our profession and helps us frame issues like censorship, privacy, technology, and equal access, but it was largely because I already identified with these values and viewpoints that I sought to pursue librarianship in the first place. Library school also gave me a shared vocabulary and experience with other librarians and library students, and helps me better articulate and share those values. For all the disparate experiences we’ve had with library school, librarians still manage to maintain a strong sense of professional identity, job satisfaction, motivation, and community–not only through library school but also through publications, blogs, conferences, and groups like the Desk Set.
For these reasons, I’ve come to believe that being a librarian is more than just mastery of specific skills and rules such as how to use Boolean operators to search a database, how to set up a blog, or how to geographically subdivide a subject heading. These skills and rules can be learned outside of library school, and are constantly changing anyway. Rather, it is in part because of library school, and the community of librarians I’ve found among my classmates and colleagues, that I am better able to appreciate why we bother to nurture these skills and rules and technologies in the first place. When it gets hard to see past the distractions and frustrations of our immediate work situations, and when our MLS feels like it’s lost its luster, it helps to know that we who call ourselves “librarians” can support each other–whether it’s through serving on a committee, writing a blog, or contributing to a fundraiser, or simply offering a sympathetic ear when venting those frustrations over post-work drinks or on Facebook. The lengths to which librarians go to do so is tribute to this fact. In that sense, it would be unrealistic to expect the MLS alone to give us all the skills and motivation we need to sustain us through an entire career. Library school may be a starting point for forming professional identity and skills, but it only bears any meaning if we continue to work together to improve the policies, services, funding, and education that allow us to call ourselves librarians.
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