Observations about Educating Librarians, Archivists, and Digital Curators Chris Tomer School of Computing and Information University of Pittsburgh June 22, 2017 My biases? I believe that the relevance and value of education for librarianship and archival practice has been diminished by the iSchool movement, and by the fact that LIS education now rarely draws full-time instructors directly from professional practice. The key to your success? Asking good questions and pursuing the answers to those questions with common sense and vigor, focusing at almost every turn on the question of what will contribute to the development of the knowledge and skills that new librarians, archivists, and curators need in order to practice at high levels. The questions themselves should be relevant, purposeful, open but with direction, and lead to conclusions that can be operationalized.

LIS Education Today Understanding of professional requirements and concerns tend to be weak Curricula often reflect the interests of faculty members rather than the state of professional knowledge or the requirements of professional practice Responses to challenges in areas such as information technology, management, and analytics tend to be weak and poorly focused Curricula dealing with core issues, e.g., organization, reference and information retrieval, collection development, and preservation are often overly conceptual, outdated, and afford little or no programmatic continuity Practica are often disconnected from other forms of course work and their supervision and assessment are commonly nominal Tuition-driven – a major difference between most LIS programs and the iSchools is that the latter operate on the often untenable assumption of substantial soft- money support Whither information science and the markets addressed by the so-called “ischools”? A response to market conditions that have created a demand for database managers, systems administrators, et al., with lightweight programming skills. But not a coherent discipline in any meaningful sense. The non-traditional job markets for librarians and archivists? Largely mythic.

Theory versus Practice The “theory versus practice” debate has informed LIS education for more than several generations now, in the process provoking surprisingly little debate about when and where the claim of theoretical foundations has any real credibility. My own view, an admittedly jaundiced view, is that the theoretical basis for library and information science may take 25-30 minutes to present, thus freeing instructors to focus almost all of their attention on the more practical business of organizing and providing access to relevant resources.

Foundational Aspects of LIS Education Professional programs are typically offered at the graduate level, but have also been commonly based until recently on assumptions and curricular structures associated with baccalaureate-level study The essence of library and information science is cataloging and reference -- other subjects, such as information technology and aspects of management, are of pivotal importance to professional practice, but they are tangential to the body of knowledge that defines LIS.

Distinguishing between What is Desirable and What is Essential It is desirable, for example, for students to learn about the history of libraries and librarianship. The question is, from the perspective of developing the requisite professional skills, whether learning about the history of libraries and librarianship is as important as learning, for example, about cataloging, classification, and metadata systems. Curriculum building and course sequencing tends to be less coherent when content and structures are influenced more heavily by faculty interests than by the requirements of establishing a foundation for professional practice.

Knowledge and Skills Inventory Specifying what a graduate of the program should know and be able to do is a key element in the development of curriculum. Once this matrix of knowledge and skills has been established, questions about how students will acquire them can be addressed and courses can be defined in terms of content and sequencing. Leveraging the Advantages of Practice-oriented Development and Design

Purposes of Information Technology Instruction/Learning in the Context of LIS Education Is the modern library a “technological organization”? Is the effective use of information technologies an essential element in the future success of libraries and/or archives? How much do librarians and archivists need to know and understand about the technologies that they use for work and as a basis for the delivery of services?

Pervasive Themes as Opposed to Discrete Courses Can building relevant knowledge and skill in information technology, management, research methods and systems analysis, etc., be conveyed via specific courses, or does it take a more pervasive, more overarching approach that runs throughout the curriculum? The advantages to more traditional approaches are simplicity and limited needs for co-operation and co-ordination. The disadvantages? What is learned tends to be isolated, limited, and disjointed.

“Ready-to-Work” Philosophy What will be the program’s learning outcomes? How will those outcomes be defined? One of the possibilities is that the learning goals of the program are defined in terms of preparing students to perform certain services at a professional level on the first day of work, e.g., reference and reader’s services, digital curation, basic technical processing and metadata generation

Is Environmental Differentiation Important? How much importance should be attached to the difference between, say, academic and public libraries as service environments, and are those differences great enough to be reflected in terms of curricular structure? How about the differences between librarianship and archival practice? Or archival practice and digital curation/stewardship?

Online Learning and Course Design For practical reasons it will be desirable to offer both face-to- face and online versions of many courses Taking an “online first” approach to the development of courses and working with instructional designers with experience in online education will produce generally more effective designs for both forms of delivery, because the design of online courses tends to address issues that are commonly ignored in traditional classroom offerings

Student-Center Approaches to Course Design and Delivery Recognizing and Acting on the Preferences, Needs, and Weaknesses of Contemporary Students Using Student Cohorts as a Means of Organizing and Communicating with Students Effect of rubric-oriented learning Need to quiz students on the contents of a course syllabus

Faculty Development ALA accreditation and operational conditions will require full-time faculty members, leading to questions about the roles such faculty members will play in the program and in the areas of expertise they will possess and pursue Full-time faculty should include as many professors of practice as it does tenure-stream members to afford ongoing connections to professional practice Is available grant funding sufficient to enable support for faculty via research? Probably not.