No question is more likely than the following to provoke a donnybrook among academic librarians: Should every or even most librarians possess a master of library and information science (M.L.I.S. or M.L.S.) degree? Pose the question, step back and watch the fireworks.
A recent survey I conducted of every R-1 and R-2 university library in the United States (with responses from the top library official at 167 universities) identified tremendous dissatisfaction with the profession’s traditional treatment of this degree as the sole or even best credential for academic librarians. A significant and especially vociferous minority of administrators (31 percent) still insist that the M.L.S. serve as a mandatory, bedrock qualification for practitioners, asserting that those without said degree should never hold the title “librarian.” But a strong majority are now willing to consider alternative credentials.
I side with that burgeoning majority. In light of developments over the last few decades, those who contend we should treat the degree as optional rather than mandatory have the stronger case. Herewith, I present six observations in favor of recognizing alternative credentials for those the academy hires as librarians.
First, responses to the national survey are replete with reports of an inability to find among library school graduates the skills necessary to do the library jobs that need doing. Leaders offered frank and often scathing assessments of the competencies library school graduates bring (and often do not bring) to the job market. Skills cited as in especially short supply include teaching experience, STEM expertise, social science expertise, art curation, spatial studies, organizational development, computer science, all manner of disciplinary fields, “area studies” of all types, scholarly communications, data visualization, research-data services, data management, information technology and systems work, geographic information systems, digital scholarship, data science, “data-intensive” fields, assessment, computational methods, fundraising, communications, publicity and marketing, and “information policy.”
Simply put, administrators at many leading research libraries are not finding enough good librarians among library school graduates.
Second, mandating the M.L.S. imposes a narrow disciplinary mandate that other fields in the academy are unwilling to impose, and such a mandate thus restricts our hiring in ways other fields do not restrict theirs. Many fields highly attentive to credentialing seek candidates with degrees in far-flung disciplines: women’s studies, bioinformatics, environmental studies, ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, information science, media studies and neuroscience, to name just a few. All such fields hire faculty with degrees from across the disciplinary spectrum. Or consider a large religion department, which might employ faculty with degrees in hermeneutics, classics, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, religion, philosophy, theology, homiletics and even linguistics, music, education and law.
The point is that other disciplines accept multiple types of credentials for multiple types of work and expertise. Of course they demand professional credentials, but they do not define those credentials as narrowly as do librarians arguing for a mandatory M.L.S. It is not clear why librarianship should foreclose such interdisciplinarity from itself. In fact, it is odd that librarianship—arguably the most interdisciplinary of fields—would impose disciplinary mandates that other fields eschew.
Third, the national survey results show that library administrators who have hired and thus worked with non-M.L.S. librarians are significantly more likely than administrators who have not to believe that non-M.L.S. librarians make good librarians. They know them. They know their work. And they speak highly of that work. Those, on the other hand, who argue that librarians without an M.L.S. are less effective are less likely to have hired and thus worked with such people. In short, those inclined to expand candidate pools beyond M.L.S. holders tend, on average, to speak from the experience of working with such candidates; those more suspicious of non-M.L.S. librarians speak from less experience with those candidates.
To put this another way: Those who argue that non-M.L.S. librarians can obtain necessary skills on the job are, disproportionately, those who have witnessed non-M.L.S. librarians at work. Those who argue that librarians with Ph.D.s in other fields can be socialized into the profession have, for the most part, witnessed attempts at socialization.
Fourth, those who have hired candidates without an M.L.S. are extraordinarily likely to do so again. Only six of the 80 respondents to the survey who hired a librarian without an M.L.S. in the last 10 years said they do not plan to do so in the next 10. (By comparison, 31 of the 80 who have not hired a librarian without an M.L.S. in the last 10 years do plan to hire one in the next 10 years.) In fact, a remarkable 108 of the 167 total respondents plan to hire a librarian without an M.L.S. in the next 10 years.
Fifth, practices are evolving toward alternative credentialing. The question is shifting from “Why would we hire librarians without an M.L.S.?” to “Why would we not hire librarians without an M.L.S.?” Another recent survey found that librarians hired after 2009 “were more welcoming of Ph.D. holders without M.L.S. degrees compared to older generations of librarians.” The federal Office of Personnel Management does not require an M.L.S. for its Librarian Series 1410 classification, a classification that applies to librarian positions at the Library of Congress. In 1986 those without an M.L.S. represented only 7 percent of new librarians; by 2015 this number had grown to 24 percent.
Marybeth F. and Paul W. Grimes report that “Job openings requiring an M.L.S. peaked in the early 1990s”; they found “a significant drop” beginning in 2000 in the number of mandatory-M.L.S. positions. As they wrote, “In 2000, only 75 percent of all advertised jobs [in College & Research Libraries News] listed the M.L.S. as a prerequisite for applicants, and by 2005 the number had dropped even further to approximately 58 percent.”
Elizabeth A. Waraksa has reported on early complaints and resistance surrounding the 2004 launch of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, designed to offer a path into academic librarianship for Ph.D. holders without an M.L.S., while noting that, by 2006, the debate had “largely disappeared from the literature”; Daphnée Rentfrow likewise observed in 2007 that “the initial negative response” to the CLIR program was “turning into a more positive embrace.”
The national survey of research libraries makes clear how widespread alternative-credentialing allowances are today: 65 percent of R-1 and R-2 university libraries now have policies allowing them to appoint librarians who do not have an M.L.S. or foreign equivalent. Only 17 percent of university library administrators do not support recruiting, in at least some cases, librarian candidates with a Ph.D. but not an M.L.S. That figure falls to 12 percent at R-1 institutions and 9 percent at Association of American Universities and/or Association of Research Libraries member institutions. Only 15 percent believe that librarians without an M.L.S. are less effective than those with an M.L.S. That figure falls to 8 percent at R-1 institutions and 5 percent at AAU/ARL institutions.
Furthermore, 61 percent of respondents report that it is prohibitively difficult to hire all the librarians they need if they limit candidate pools to those with an M.L.S. Only 20 percent disagree, and only 5 percent believe that faculty and students treat librarians with an M.L.S. better than those without. Only 16 percent believe that faculty librarians without an M.L.S. are less likely to gain tenure, and only 14 percent believe they are less likely to be promoted.
Those arguing for a mandatory M.L.S. ultimately face the ugly task of explaining to the 65 percent of universities that plan to hire non-M.L.S. librarians and to the 48 percent of universities that have already done so—and who are pleased with the performance of those librarians—why they should not. And it requires the even uglier task of telling good librarians they should not be librarians.
Sixth, those who seek candidates only among M.L.S. holders must contend with the dispiriting homogeneity in our field: By last count, 87 percent of those who hold an M.L.S. identify as white and 81 percent as women. Such statistics are significantly out of step with the demographics of Ph.D. holders in other fields. Likewise, racial and gender diversity among recent M.L.S. recipients badly trails diversity among recent Ph.D. recipients. These demoralizing figures factor into the thinking of libraries expanding the range of acceptable credentials. And, one may surmise, they explain why, when reminded of librarian demographics, only 14 percent of respondents to the national survey indicated that our profession should exclude candidates with advanced degrees other than the M.L.S.
Those who argue for a mandatory M.L.S., and who simultaneously profess commitments to diversifying our profession, bear the burden of proposing efficacious alternatives. Few emerged in survey responses from mandatory-M.L.S. proponents. And given our profession’s failure to move the diversity needle significantly, it’s clear that what alternatives do exist are not working—at least not at scale. But even if they were, or could, or might (our profession should leave no promising options untested), why would we not add to the mix of options by searching for candidates beyond a pool that is 87 percent white?
The good news: The same study that identified such disquiet and discontent over traditional credentialing practices identified a host of new approaches and advice for rethinking and reforming such practices, accompanied by a bevy of success stories. For those eager to expand the pool of candidates our profession so badly needs—who wish to attract the best and the brightest, regardless of particular degrees—these stories are well worth reading. Change is afoot. And reports from changemakers could not be more encouraging.
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