The Australian Library Journal
volume 50 issue 1

Losing the quality battle in Australian education for librarianship

The author asserts that something is wrong with university-based education for librarianship in Australia. Librarianship does not have a clear disciplinary identity in universities. The lack of differentiation between the roles of technicians and professionals clouds the issue. For these and other reasons, education for librarianship in Australia is suffering. Comparisons are made with the United States and Canada. Some suggestions for improving the quality of university-based education for librarianship, based on increased cooperation among departments of information studies, are made.

Manuscript received July 2000

This is a refereed article

What's amiss with education for librarianship in Australia?
Discussions with colleagues and my own observations and reflections suggest that something's amiss with university-based education for librarianship in Australia. The situation may be so grave as to be fatal. Three key issues must be addressed if we are to confirm the diagnosis and find a cure:

• what is our field?
  
  
• what is our product?
  
  
• where's the quality?
  
  

What is our field?
Perhaps the central issue is that we are losing a secure sense of what field we work in. What is librarianship? I use this term throughout, and sometimes also the term information studies to indicate the wider field of which librarianship is a part. What skills and attitudes are needed to be successful in this field, whatever it is? Do students who graduate with Australian qualifications in librarianship/information studies have these attributes? We are not alone in our insecurity. References later in this paper to the North American scene point to similar anxiety there.

Changes in the information professions make any attempt to define librarianship much less straightforward than it once was. A wider worldview is now being promulgated, both literally through globalisation and metaphorically through broadening of the discipline. Librarianship has perhaps always had an identity crisis in that it can be argued that it encompasses every field of endeavour. In today's university environment, librarianship is forming alliances with many other disciplines and subject areas, the most common in Australia being information systems, communications/media, education, and business. The degree of integration varies and the alliances are sometimes motivated by little more than the demands of a particular administrative environment - marriages of convenience, perhaps? At other times they are more truly integrated.

This lack of clear identity is illustrated locally by the faculty or discipline contexts in which Australian schools of librarianship now find themselves. Some of these exist, of course, for pragmatic reasons as universities seek to group teaching areas into administrative units that are large enough to function cost-effectively; however, we can assume that much thought and energy has also been directed to actively seeking these alliances and linkages. A list of the faculty locations of librarianship departments in Australian universities illustrates the range. (Details are taken from ALIA's website. [1]

No Australian university departments are, of course, exempt from the very considerable pressures imposed by the general political and economic environment. Recent Federal government policy has resulted in reduced funding and in the widespread introduction of fees for postgraduate qualifications. These pressures are affecting departments of librarianship. An illustration of this point is that the fees charged to students in one information studies department in an Australian university were linked to salary outcomes of graduates of the school in which that department is housed (this is anecdotal evidence). Because the larger unit is a business-oriented faculty, the salary expectations - and therefore the fees that students must pay - were unrealistically high for graduates in librarianship. This resulted in significantly lower student demand for these courses.

What is our product?
The professional/technician divide (or more accurately, lack of divide) is another problem. The lack of distinction between the roles and tasks of technician and professional creates employer and student and employee uncertainty. Australian librarianship has done itself a major disservice - perhaps even inflicted on itself a mortal wound - by allowing the development of technicians without reassessing thoroughly the role of professional librarians. Too few professional librarians have taken intelligent account of the time and energies released for higher professional work by the introduction and steady advancement of technicians, and upgraded their own professional activities accordingly.

The long-standing argument whether education for librarianship is appropriate at the undergraduate level is another part of the problem. After more than two decades of working in the library education field, teaching technicians, undergraduates and graduates, I am convinced that we have done ourselves another major disservice by not actively and energetically promoting ourselves as a graduate (professional masters) profession.

The consequence of the lack of distinction between technician, undergraduate and graduate qualifications is that librarianship in Australia is no longer exactly sure what it is and who it wants to participate in it. This lack of clarity, this murkiness, weakens the ability of Australian librarianship to speak with one voice about the kind of person it considers as 'professional'.

Where's the quality?
One of the brave experiments in Australian library education was the MA at Monash's Graduate School of Librarianship, now dead, regrettably. This enrolled only students with good honours degrees, and required them to study for two years full time and produce a dissertation before awarding them a degree which had been assessed by ALIA to be acceptable as a first professional qualification. It died partly because of its timing. Jean Whyte introduced it in 1980 but by the late 1980s it was caught up in the proliferation of LIS courses in Australia (16 by 1985) and could not attract sufficient students with acceptable academic entry qualifications. Monash diversified, and the academic entry requirements for its students were lowered. Similar patterns were evident elsewhere in Australia. Few of the students we currently admit into graduate diploma- and masters-level first professional qualifications in Australia have a strong academic record. The result has been a deterioration in quality, especially in the thinking and problem-solving abilities of librarians. This may not be evident in the workforce yet, but certainly will be when the current crop of senior library managers retires.

Library schools (to use a shorthand term for departments of information studies) do not attract students of high calibre. Instead, they get many students who enter the profession at TAFE level, articulate their TAFE qualification into an undergraduate degree and then, perhaps encouraged by the lack of clear statements from the professional body, consider themselves as the equals of the holders of graduate diplomas and masters degrees who have been trained to think much more rigorously in their first degrees, and who typically have a wider world view by virtue of studying in disciplines outside a primarily skills-focussed education for librarianship. The contrast is between those who lack an in-depth knowledge of another subject area or discipline and those who possess it; between those whose librarianship education has been essentially skills-based, and those who have demonstrated their ability to think critically; between those whose librarianship education has not encouraged them to think and solve problems, and those who can. Professionally, we need librarians who can readily synthesise, evaluate, and make a decision, then act.

There is also a lack of senior professionals seriously addressing research by themselves participating, either formally through enrolment in research degrees or less formally through workplace research, and actively encouraging it in the workplace. There are exceptions to this, for example the research being carried out by Maureen Kahlert in Western Australia on the elderly and public libraries, and by Kay Poustie into aspects of public libraries through the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Comparisons with the US and Canada
Two papers presented at a seminar held in December 1999 in Adelaide provide interesting comparisons with education for librarianship in Australia. The Reflective Practice: Library and Information Studies Education for the Future seminar, hosted by the University of South Australia in Adelaide on 2 December 1999, featured keynote papers by Ken Haycock on the current state of education for librarianship in the United States and by Ann Curry on what's happening in Canada.

Professor Haycock is the director of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He chaired the American Library Association's 1999 Congress on Professional Education. His paper, 'The ALA Congress on Professional Education - Recommendations for Change', emphasised that the basic librarianship qualification in the US is the masters' degree. In essence, to practise as a librarian an MLIS from an ALA-accredited library school is essential: Haycock notes that North American libraries simply will not hire applicants who do not have this qualification.

Dr Ann Curry is chair, Library and Information Studies Program, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her paper, 'Canadian LIS Education: Creating Entrepreneurs, not Functionaries', presented the results of her recent research into LIS education in Canada's seven library schools. The masters' degree is the base qualification; Canadian schools do not offer undergraduate degrees in librarianship.

Comparison with the Australian situation is not easy. For the US and Canadian library schools, consumer information: how many staff? number of students? ranking in comparison to other LIS schools? is readily available through statistics compiled by ALISE (the Association of Library and Information Studies Educators.[2] There is no Australian equivalent. Unlike their US counterparts, Australian library schools do not publish readily available consumer information. For example, one crude measure of quality is the number of academics who can be clearly identified as LIS staff, but to determine this for Australian LIS courses, considerable effort is required to search through the Web sites of the library schools (sometimes themselves difficult to locate) or through the handbooks of the universities. For the US the ALISE statistics indicate that in 1997-98 the most common number of full-time academic staff was 11, with a range from 5 to 29.[3]

I am writing this at UCLA (the University of California Los Angeles) where I am based in the Department of Information Studies. This is a graduate school, of course, as are all of the US library schools, and it is one of the highest ranking in the country. Rankings are published and widely available.[4]This raises another question for Australia: how do Australian students assess the quality of LIS schools as part of their decision about which school to attend, given the lack of consumer information and published rankings. The most immediately obvious differences between UCLA and an Australian library school are the high number of faculty (15 full-time academic staff), the high ratio of faculty to students (an annual intake of about 80%-90 masters students and 4-8 doctoral students), and the strong and vibrant cohort of doctoral students (about 40 at any one time). Research is seriously addressed at this library school. Every academic staff member holds a doctoral degree and all of them are actively engaged in grant-funded research in information studies. No Australian school can currently claim to be in a similar position.

Political imperatives
We cannot, of course, directly compare the Australian situation with that in the US or Canada. One difference is that until recently all states and territories in Australia have felt the need to maintain a presence in education for librarianship. This is, curiously, despite the availability of librarianship courses by distance education in Australia for over twenty years, with an increasing number of offerings available. Why, for example, does the Northern Territory maintain a presence in education for librarianship? Why the ACT? Why South Australia? (Tasmania however, decided about a decade ago that it was too small to maintain a presence in this field at graduate level.)

Canada, broadly comparable with Australia in its federal/province structure but with a larger population, over 30 million in 1999,[5] feels no such political imperative. It has seven library schools for its ten provinces and three territories. The reason for this pluralism in Australia can only be political, explained by the state versus federal battle which influences so much of what Australia does in many fields of endeavour. Most Australian states and territories have small populations.

It is unlikely that LIS schools established under this political imperative in Australia will survive the funding pressures currently applying across tertiary education: nevertheless, it is important to maintain intellectual and professional diversity in librarianship programs, each having a different flavour, so to speak. How can viable programs be maintained with low staff numbers, sometimes below critical mass? My experience suggests that an absolute minimum of six full-time academic staff is required.

Allied to this is the development over recent years of a state- or city-specific flavour of some Australian information studies course (at least from my perception). For examples, UTS (University of Technology Sydney) is Sydney-centric (or perhaps this should be large city-centric) in its generic approach to information studies; and Curtin University of Technology is Perth- and WA-specific in its focus.

One possible conclusion is that only a couple of Australian schools have anything like a critical mass of staff, and for some it is difficult to see how they are viable. Some exist because they have made special arrangements (the course at Northern Territory University, for example, has an agreement with Charles Sturt University which supplies course material). Some exist, as suggested above, for a particular political reason. Using the crude measure of number of teaching staff, others are near, perhaps even in, the terminal phase.

Do we want to change?
Perhaps, of course, the library profession in Australia is content to remain as one which doesn't attract students of the highest academic calibre, one whose members are mainly content to master skills, rather than apply these skills in a thoughtful manner and to develop new techniques and theories to inform that practice. The consequence is already with us: low status, low pay, an aging profession, threatened because of its inaction by more energetic and aggressive IT professionals who promote themselves and their products as a replacement.

What can we do?
Assuming we want to change, how can we improve the quality of education for librarianship in Australia? The library profession cannot rely on the academy to take all of the lead under the current regime, where the imperative is less to support quality programs than it is to maintain maximum levels of funding which is largely based on student numbers and the fees they are now required to pay. The profession must rely on its own resources to make these changes. Professional associations - ALIA, ASA, RMAA -- can exert pressure, but currently don't do enough. ALIA, for instance, doesn't have statements of sufficient strength about the role and significance of research and research degrees in professional practice. It has only just begun to fill the gap left by the demise of AACOBS (never adequately filled by ACLIS) in determining and promoting a research agenda for the information professions. It doesn't, by and large, use its most powerful tool - the course recognition process - in the most effective way, preferring to recognise almost every course for the maximum period rather than to use its teeth to effect real change and improvement. These and other activities need to be developed and strengthened to maintain and improve the health and well being of the profession.

The greater question, though, is how to ensure the survival of an adequate number of library schools in Australia, and how to improve the quality of what they offer and the students they attract. 'Share to survive'? Or, perhaps, 'collaborate or crash'? These thoughts were prompted, in part, by my attendance at the Reflective practice: library and information studies education for the future seminar. Two useful ideas were suggested at this seminar: first, that the 'core' collection notion could be appropriate for thinking about library education in Australia; and second, that Australian libraries are comfortable with the idea of DNC/Conspectus, so why not with DLE - Distributed Library Education? Libraries have long accepted the notion of maintaining a 'core' collection, with other libraries specialising in a range of collecting and service areas on which they can call. Such arrangements can be formalised (MINTERLIB in Victoria was one example), or can be more in the nature of a gentlemen's agreement, or can be governed by formal legislation (such as state library-public library relationships). This is a possible model for information studies schools.

What has changed in recent years, what has made such thinking feasible, is of course online delivery and flexible delivery.

'Share to survive'
Some possible models, not mutually exclusive, are presented here.

• Local core, imported specialisms. Core subjects become a local responsibility, developed and delivered by staff in the library school; tuition in specialist and higher-level subjects is bought in, or developed in collaboration with others and maintained and offered (and perhaps delivered) jointly. This has already happened on a small scale in Australia at the individual level (that is, through arrangements between an individual and a school), but has not yet occurred at the institutional level. For this to take place effectively on a larger scale, issues of intellectual property and administration need to be addressed.
  
  
• Imported core, local specialisms. Core subjects, and perhaps even core courses, are developed and maintained (and perhaps also delivered) by a consortium and are bought in by the information studies school, which is then able to concentrate on its area(s) of staff, school and faculty expertise, in turn exporting this to others. For example, there have been difficulties over many years in locating appropriate expertise in Australia to teach bibliographic organization and the organization of information. Subjects developed by a consortium would minimise these problems.
  
  
• Consortium specialisms. Specialist sequences of subjects are developed, maintained and delivered by a consortium. This has the significant advantage of encouraging areas of expertise to be developed. In Australia there is currently little evidence of this, few schools being large enough to support more than two or three staff members with significant expertise. An example is preservation. In the United States the University of Texas at Austin has a whole program devoted to preservation, an MLIS specialty in preservation administration; UCLA has three faculty members with significant preservation expertise, especially in digital preservation, plus all of the resources of the Los Angeles film and multimedia industries and of the nearby Getty Research Institute to call on. Australia has no similar concentration of expertise in preservation in any one school.
  
  
• Any combination of the above.

There are many issues to be addressed if any of these suggestions are to be developed. For example, determining appropriate financial arrangements may be problematic, given that information studies schools charge different fees, and the administrative mechanisms needed for consortia of staff employed by different universities will require some innovative thinking. However, the benefits outweigh the problems. Chief among them is the time made available to allow the development of specialist offerings at the local level, which in turn could be available elsewhere. None of the Australian information studies schools can currently offer such specialisms; law librarianship was noted at the Reflective practice: library and information studies education for the future seminar, as one for which there is a demand. The result would be a greater range of courses and specialisms available nationally, and the development of centres of excellence, leading in turn to improved standards through the grouping together and time available to research and generate new theory and practice. The whole of the information sector in Australia would benefit.

Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Alison Batterham for providing information, and to Rachel Salmond for her comments.

References
1. http://archive.alia.org.au/education/courses/librarianship.html (20 January 2000).

2. http://www.ils.unc.edu/ALISE/1998/

3. http://www.ils.unc.edu/ALISE/1998/Faculty/faculty.html

4. For example: Berry, John. 'Students Sound Off About Their Schools', Library Journal, 1 November 1999: 46-48; Budd, John M. 'Scholarly Productivity of US LIS Faculty: An Update', Library Quarterly, v.70 no.2, 2000: 230-245.

5. http://www.statcan.ca