Professionalism - Does it Count?

Abstract

Argues that the actual practice of the profession is at least as important as tbe initial education given to new entrants, and suggests several ways, such as internship, cross-training and formal staf exchanges, which might improve professional standards and tbe status of the library profession.

In my earlier paper, given in Sydney in 1988, I addressed the issue of professional-ism.¹ In this paper I want to ask the question: ‘does it count’, does it really matter? Would it not be better if we just got on with the job and forgot about the issue of librarianship as a profession?

As I indicated previously there is by no means agreement on whether or not librarianship is a profession, and, if it is what kind of profession it is? Our professional associations have sought to raise its status. Entry is now solely through graduate professional qualifications, and it has much of the trappings of a profes-sion, but are its adherents operating as professionals, and, if they are not does it really matter anyway?

A ward Restructuring and Multiskilllng

Many readers will be aware of the processes of award restructuring - and the concomittant processes of multi-skil-ling - that are currently happening here in Australia. This has the potential to present a very real threat to the integrity of our profession. Australian governments appear to have little or no sympathy for the professions. The federal government has already attempted to merge clerical and professional grades in the public service. In Western Australia there has been a strong push to eliminate the requirement for professional qualifications above the base professional level, so that senior management positions in information and library services could be filled by people without library qualifications. In Canberra, at the Australian National University and at the Australian Defence Force Academy, the process of aligning library positions with the clerical and administrative grades is well advanced, including most of the professional positions, although in the latter at least the requirement for professional qualifications has been retained. This is only the prelude to the implementation of the Higher Education Award where there is a single scale for all non-academic staff. In these circum-stances it is vital that we fight to retain the requirement for professional qualifications at the higher levels, and to succeed in this we have to be able to show that the profession of librarianship means something more than the simple aggregation of skills.

Library Education and Recruitment

Library education has come under criticism here in Australia, in the United States and in the United Kingdom. A recent issue of the journal of Library Administration was devoted entirely to the subject of library education and employer expectations. ² Misgivings about the situation in the United Kingdom were expressed in a recent article by Derek Law, the Librarian of King’s College, London³, and these are but two of the more recent contributions to the topic. In Australia I have heard similar views expressed about the situation across the country from Brisbane to Penh. Does this mean that library schools are unanimous failures, or that the systems of professional accreditation administered by our own association, the American Library Association and the British Library Association are all one big waste of time? I do not believe this to be the case. Perhaps we as a profession should stop looking for scapegoats and accept our own share in the responsibility for the shortcomings of the profession.

The problems at the entry level, as I see them, are threefold:

Recruitment

Do we succeed in recruiting dynamic high achievers to the profession? Our success, or otherwise, is related to our image, which is a topic that has received more agonising over than almost anything else. However, it seems quite clear, that whatever else, we do need to improve our marketing skills and get the message across somehow concerning the real value and importance of librarian-ship. The ultimate future of our profession depends on the quality of recruitment, and that in tum depends firmly on us, and the type of librarians we are perceived to be. Our public relations stan at the front desk of our libraries. What son of image do we present?

Education

Whilst I do not say that education is entirely to blame for our problems, it must shoulder at least some of the responsibility for the present situation. In order to survive, library schools across the world have been playing politics to justify their existence and to jockey for position and students. I have no doubt that if a Committee of Inquiry into Library Education were to be established here in Australia and recommended that, for example, there should only be six library schools and that the normal qualification should be a two year Postgraduate Masters Degree covering the core areas of our profession, there would be a howl of protest based more on vested interests rather than on a serious consideration of what would produce the best outcome for the profession. But is the present situation viable? Do we need 19 library schools, or however many there are, in Australia? Is the staple three year under-graduate degree really producing the type of librarian we need in an academic library? Does the one year Postgraduate Diploma student really have enough time to get a thorough grounding in the profession? Is the pursuit of the fashionable ‘information’-related subjects in the curriculum, at the expense of bread and butter topics, in our best interests? Michael Gorman, writing earlier this year in American Libraries, has drawn attention to the dangers of the ‘gadarene rush of library schools to identify themselves as teaching ... something called “information science’“, rather than concentrating on passing on a coherent body of solid library education.⁴

None of these courses produce a librarian who can be equally effective on day one in anything from a small one-person special library to the National Library of Australia. As they do not, and indeed reasonably cannot, why do we pretend that they can by granting automatic professional status as an Associate to the graduates?

At the same time, in common with Derek Law,⁵ I do not believe we, the practitioners in the profession, spend enough time talking to our colleages who after all educate our staff. It cannot be a healthy sign that we do not mix routinely, and that for many library school staff their peer group is their academic colleagues rather than us, the practitioners. If we don’t talk to each other, then how can we expect a meeting of minds?

Expectations

Are our expectations of the beginning professional reasonable? The library schools will tell us that they are there to educate, not train, to teach conceptual skills and principles rather than detailed practice. Fine, and that is how it should be, and if we could all recognise that and accept it, a great deal of the existing tensions would disappear. However the reality is that the majority of employers expect of the new graduate a turnkey black box - plug them in and away they go pre-programmed to work efficiently in whatever environment they find themselves. A moment’s thought will reveal how unreasonable that is. Yet many of us approach the employment of new graduates with just that son of view, or alternatively duck the problem entirely and let them learn on the job elsewhere.

As a profession we should try, by whatever means we can, to ensure that these unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of new graduates do not occur, especial-ly in the area of one-person special libraries where newly hired graduates can be left to sink or swim on their own, and if they fail — as often happens — it is to the ultimate detriment of the profession as a whole.

In-house Training and Continuing Education

It is important that we take the issue of continuing education seriously. The government has taken the view that in the process of award restructuring and the adoption of the structural efficiency principle we should be committed to life-long learning. To give weight to its views it has now established the training guarantee scheme which requires 1% of institutional recurrent budgets to be spent on staff development and training. As a profession we should applaud this initiative as a very significant step forward. Academic libraries must ensure that they enjoy a fair share and that the 1% does not miraculously disappear to fund existing study leave programmes, conferences, etc., from which few of their staff can benefit.

A concentration on continuing education provides us with a means to solve the dilemma of what we should do about the gap between what library schools teach and what we need people to know at the various stages of their career. The process of compiling a skills audit, which is currently underway, should provide us with a very good guide to the knowledge, skills and competencies that librarians require as they move through their career. On this basis we should be able to develop a realistic and wonhwhile continuing education programme.

This externally developed program would be combined with in-house, on-the-job training to teach skills and information specific to panicular jobs. Currently this is a frequently neglected area but I would anticipate it becoming more systematic and better organised.

To give an obvious example of an area where continuing education is panicular-ly appropriate. New staff are not going to manage anything, panicularly in academ-ic. libraries. They are going to be junior members of a work group or team. Management skills are best acquired at the appropriate stage and at the level appropriate to the position. Such skills should therefore be acquired, as pan of continuing education, when they become relevant. It is a waste of time for anything more than a basic awareness to be included in the first professional qualification. We should be working to ensure that new graduates are not placed in the position of managers requiring these skills at the stan of their careers rather than arguing for their inclusion in the first degree.

Unlike many other parts of the academic institution we are in a position to offer a progressive career path to our staff including articulation from paraprofessional to professional grades. I do not believe that we can afford to be too narrow-minded about this. By and large the academic libraries represent some of the larger libraries in our national system. So whilst it may be true that we do not have a specific opening for a specific staff member and that their next career move may not be within our own library, we still have a duty to take the wider view and to develop that person’s talents for the benefit of others, as we in tum will benefit by recruiting good well trained staff from elsewhere. Possible ways in which we may do this are:

Internship this may be particularly attractive to academic libraries. An example of internship in Australia was described a couple of years ago by Craig Grimison from the University of New England who undenook an internship program at Macquarie University, based on an attenuated version of the Council on Library Resources Library Management Intern Program.⁶ He had the opponunity to work in a similar, but considerably larger library, and to broaden his horizons by undenak-ing specific projects of relevance to his home situation and at the same time had the chance to observe at close quarters how another library operated. This kind of ‘external’ internship is of particular value to the smaller academic libraries which otherwise lack the facilities to provide their staff with the depth and range of experience which may be desirable.

The conventional form of ‘internal’ internship involving the shadowing of a senior manager or the Chief Executive Officer, as laid out in the CLR scheme, may also have its place in the larger academic and research libraries. The position of ‘Executive Assistant’ could indeed be used for this purpose, where it exists.

Cross-training

At another level is the process of ‘cross-training’ which was explained in a recent article in the journal of Academic Librarianship.⁷ This is a ‘bottom-up’ approach to broadening skills and abilities where staff from different areas of the library pair off and essentially teach each other the specialist knowl-edge and skills which each has. For example, a reference librarian and cataloguer may pair, the one teaching the other basic online searching and reference skills whilst learning more about the catalogue and how best to search it to produce the best results. We are proposing to try this process at the Australian Defence Force Academy to see how useful it is.

Formal Staff Exchange

As yet we have had little experience in Australia of staff exchange schemes, and the sharing of staff during vacancies created by long service and maternity leave or even vacancies where for a variety of reasons the post is not going to be filled immediately. Just before I left the University of Western Australia we had a member of Murdoch University Library’s staff, Chris Hill, working for us for the best pan of a year as Social Sciences Librarian during the absence of the permanent incumbent. I believe that this worked very well, to the benefit of both institutions, and gave Chris an opponunity to broaden his horizons and skills similar to that enjoyed by Craig Grimison’s internship. Proposals to exchange staff as part of a regular program have been discussed from time to time and were certainly proposed some years ago in Brisbane, but I am not aware of any such schemes being actually in place.

In the context of professional development the process of staff review, by whatever name, should also have a positive side. A good review program must encompass the identification of the training needs of the individual. We can of course treat this very narrowly, as no doubt some of our institutions may prefer, or we can treat it constructively as an opportunity to develop the individual beyond the immediate requirements of the current job. Such a program also makes it quite clear that we have expectations of the individual beyond occupying a desk from nine to five and resting on the laurels of the degree or diploma they acquired many years ago.

As library managers, it seems to me that increasingly we are going to have to pay much more attention to staff training and development than we ever have before. We can no longer afford to leave it to the whim of the individual, to the accident of appropriate training opportunities presenting themselves, or to the benevolence of our institution providing money and courses. If we are to maximise the value to be obtained from the training dollar then we are going to have to carefully coordinate and plan our training activities. We need to lobby ALIA to ensure that it takes its proper role in providing courses. We need to coordinate the in-house training activities, particularly between libraries with similar needs, to maximise the benefit from the effort employed. We need to see what the library schools and TAFE can do for us and make the most of those opportunities. And, finally, we need to ensure that our own institution’s staff training coordinators fully understand the needs of libraries.

Post-Degree Qualifications

I now want to raise the question of whether or not as a profession we should give some sort of formal recognition to this expectation of life-long learning?

I still strongly believe that as a profession we abdicate our responsibilities too easily, by awarding professional membership as a kind of rubber stamp to whatever degree or diploma the library school has awarded. At best this leads us to be seen as an anachronism. Why should anyone want to join the association, to pay these exorbitant fees - and all for what? No thanks!

The conventional responses along the lines of ‘ask not what the association can do for you, ask what you can do for the association’ or ‘you get out of it what you put into it’, whilst all very true, frequently fall on deaf ears and do little to encourage membership.

The award of the Associateship should mean something, an acknowledgement by one’s peers of a level of professional competence. For reasons discussed above it is all too clear that the library school qualification does not, and cannot, do that on its own. We should seriously consider the re-introduction of a period of professional assessment before the Associateship is awarded. If it is something earned, not given away, it is more likely to be valued. Such a period of professional assessment could readily be combined with the process of mentoring, about which I will say more later.

Some time ago, in his capacity as Chair of the Board of Education, Eric Wainwright released a paper discussing the merits of an advanced Associateship to provide a means of recognition of continuing professional growth. I understand that thought is now being given to reviving this proposal in an amended form, to open up the Fellowship to the run-of-the-mill membership. I think such a move is important in showing that the profession regards continuing growth as important, and something to be aimed for.

Similar recent moves by the British Library Association have been described by Ian Lovecy. The LA has changed its requirements for the Fellowship to having candidates demonstrate that since gaining the Associateship they have ‘continued to build upon the professional development evidenced by admission to Associateship; and have contributed to the profession in some appropriate way’ .⁸ The criteria used to assess this are ‘the ability to carry out demanding tasks and handle complex professional issues; and the contribution made by the candidate to the enhancement of the whole or part of the profession’. This has had the effect of bringing the Fellowship back within the reach of many practitioners who had neither the time nor the opportunity to pursue the research route, and has given people something to aim for. The success of the change can be seen from the admission of twelve new Fellows in October 1989.

I would also argue that we should make it quite clear that there is an expectation of professional members that they will continue to grow in the profession. The British Library Association’s Code of Professional Conduct includes the following: ‘Members must be competent in their professional activities including the require-ment to keep abreast of developments in librarianship in those branches of professional practice in which qualifications and experience entitle them to en-gage’ .⁹ We could do worse than adopt a similar expectation of members of ALIA.

Mentoring Program

Finally I would like to raise another suggestion for consideration. One of the major problems identified in Perth, especially for special librarians, was the lack of a ready-made support network. Newcomers to the profession can find it very difficult to get established. In a large library this ought not to be a problem, but I suspect that unless a carefully organised ‘pastoral care’ program is in place casualties are just as likely to occur as they are in the one-person isolated library situation. Another factor is that no one likes to be thought a fool, so whilst the new recruit may have recourse to peers who could solve their problems, for one reason or another they may be reluctant to approach those colleagues.

This is a very important area in which the profession can and ought to be able to play an effective role, both in support of the newcomer, as well as the librarian returning to the workforce or of changing career paths.

I first came across a working example of such a program when a tape describing a scheme developed by the California Library Association was brought back for me from CI.A conference. ¹⁰ Since then, on joining the Library Information Technology Association (LITA) of the American Library Association I was invited to participate in a similar scheme which they were developing.

The idea is that established members of the profession register their willingness to participate in the scheme as mentors, indicating their specific areas of interest and the type of person they would be interested in helping. Newly graduated librarians, or anyone else, such as someone changing career paths can then register as proteges and are paired off with the most suitable mentor. The early reports from CIA indicate that this matching process has been successful so far, with few failures. The mentors undertake to provide help and support to their protege for a period of a year in the first instance. This takes the form of meetings, introduction to colleagues, particularly at the annual conference, and general help and advice.

I think the establishment of such a program here in Australia, sponsored by ALIA, would be immensely beneficial not only in attracting support to the association but also in raising the level of the profession. There is nothing quite as guaranteed to make sure that you understand what you are doing as having to explain it to someone else.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tony Ralli

Deputy Librarian, Australian Defence Force Academy

Notes

1. T Ralli 'LibraryProfessionals: the Association's Role' in Living Together - People Persuasion Power: Proceedings of tbe 25th LAA Conference, Sydney, 1988 Library Association of Australia Sydney 1988 pp89-103.

2. 'LibraryEducation and Employer Expectations' journal of Library Administration vol 11 nos 3-4 1988.

3. D Law 'Education Needs of the 1990s' Catalogue and Index no 94 Autumn 1989 pp l, 3-7.

4. M Gorman 'A Bogus and Dismal Science, or the Eggplant That Ate Library Schools' American Libraries vol 21 no 5 May 1990 pp462-3.

5. Law, pl.

6. C Grimison 'The Internship as a Professional Development Programme' Australian Academic and Research Libraries vol 19 no 4 1988 pp229-35.

7. E Gossen et al 'Forging New Communication Links in an Academic Library: A Cross-training Experiment' journal ofAcademic Librarianship vol 16 no 1 1990 ppl8-21.

8. I Lovecy 'Followship in a Modem Context .. .' Library Association Record vol 91 no 11 1989 p626.

9. Library Association 'Code of Professional Conduct' Tbe Library Association Yearbook 1988 ppl28-9.

10. J Brasley et al 'Become a Mentor - Become a Protege' California Library Association Conference 1989 Paper B 287-6.