The Australian Library Journal
volume 50 issue 3

The search for the philosopher's stone: balancing librarianship education in core and evolving knowledges

Manuscript received August 2001

The question posed
Ross Harvey's article, 'Losing the quality battle in Australian education for librarianship' (2001), may be read as a lament for all things past, a jeremiad in which the prophet cries for a return to the straight and narrow paths of former practices. Readers may focus on the dramatic statements in the first half of the paper without placing them in the context of the proposals that follow. If they do so, they will miss the attention-grabbing function of these statements, which are designed to provoke constructive debate.

Declaring that there is something 'amiss with university-based education for librarianship in Australia' and that 'the situation may be so grave as to be fatal' (2001: 15), Harvey asserts that our field lacks a 'clear identity' (p16), the 'product' of librarianship education has been compromised by the dissolution of the professional/technician divide, and the quality eroded by admissions policies which do not require applicants to have 'a strong academic record'(p17). The consequences he claims are dire: there has been 'a deterioration in ... the thinking and problem-solving abilities of librarians' (p17).

While making these claims, Harvey maintains a style of bold generalisation, neither qualified, nor, more significantly, supported by reference to research or to specific instances. For example, he asserts that the deterioration he claims in the thinking and problem-solving skills of librarians 'may not be evident in the workforce yet, but [that it] certainly will be when the current crop of senior managers retires' (p17). This style of contention compels readers to examine for themselves the present state of education for librarianship in Australia for they cannot engage directly in affirmation or rebuttal of Harvey's point since it is couched as an outcome for which there is presently no observable evidence and only a predicted consequence.

Given the register of the language employed and the style adopted with it, one could dismiss Harvey's paper as merely an opinion piece. Certainly, the paper is drawn from the author's 'own observations and reflections' and 'discussions with colleagues' (p15). However, a failure to give weight to the opinions of people distinguished by their educational achievements and their professional commitment and whose careers have provided them with decades of experience critical to the matter in hand is foolish. Those who believe that matters of profundity may be explored and debated adequately within the constraints of research reports confuse information with knowledge, fail to understand the limitations of quantitative data in representing facts, let alone truths, and are probably still seduced by the comforting fallacy that the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity is dichotomous.

Equally one cannot accept Harvey's statements as they stand. While the status of the author and his colleagues must lend them weight, they are so blunt and uncontextualised that, while they offer significant foci for precipitating debate, they cannot be accepted as 'facts' for which solutions must be found.

Take, for example, Harvey's statement that 'my experience suggests that an absolute minimum of six full-time academic staff is required' to maintain 'critical mass' in an LIS school (p19). Before one can agree or disagree with this proposition, one needs to know what constitutes an LIS school, what programs the school aims to offer, to whom and in what mode of delivery. Six full-time staff would be hard pressed to offer course work programs, maintain significant research programs and supervise research degrees if they were an independent unit, a school and a cost centre in any real organisational sense.

By way of contrast, at the University of South Australia, the five-member Library and Information Studies team based in the School of Communication, Information and New Media, is supported in the delivery of their programs not only by the structures of the broader school but also by a selected group of sessional teachers who are practising professionals. The term 'sessional staff' is used to describe people who contribute to program and course design, set assignments and undertake major responsibility for delivering courses both internally and externally in areas of their expertise. It does not include people who come in to give a single lecture or two or lead a seminar.

This combination of staffing establishes the academic staff as ultimately responsible for the academic design and support of programs, but infuses into teaching the immediate experiences of professionals who are currently engaged in information industries. Given this approach to staffing, our programs are enriched by staff who combine contemporary professional experience and academic approaches to knowledge. It is obvious that student fieldwork placements are also enhanced by the staffing structure. What will not be evident to the outside observer is how the close collaboration of practitioner and academic in the educational enterprise has shaped the design of newly developed academic programs that we will offer next year. Working with a range of professionals on a constant basis helped guide and support the continuing academic staff in their efforts to develop a coursework masters in Knowledge Management, a coursework masters in Internet Strategies and a professional doctorate in Communication. The first two programs are seen as professional educational opportunities in areas of high contemporary relevance by which students may also contribute to research through a minor thesis. The professional doctorate is a research degree, but structured in such a way as to make it easier for mid-career professionals to undertake applied research relevant to their professional roles. All of the new degrees draw on the expertise of people and courses from outside of the Library and Information Studies teaching area. Thus in terms of identifiable librarianship staff, the University of South Australia Information Studies team does not meet Harvey's minimum of six full-time LIS academic staff. Yet in fact a much wider range of staffing and resources is brought to bear on information studies education by this approach than a six member staff in an independent department could achieve.

In pursuing a review of 'Australian education for librarianship', it is essential to define terms. It is particularly important to select metaphors with care. Early in his article, Harvey selects the term 'library school' as a short-hand term for departments of information studies (p17). Herein lies a major difficulty that threads through the paper. Concise terms are always preferable to loose or diffuse ones, but when a term like 'library school' is used to denote an organisation which evolved from but actually replaced the former one, then the metaphor confounds the issues rather than illuminating them. The history of the changes in Australian institutions from 'library schools' to departments of information studies nested in broader units of related disciplines is not solely a matter of the contraction of resources, shotgun weddings of shattered remnants and the provision of shelter for the shattered survivors of redundancy processes. While these factors have been influential, many educators seized the opportunities offered to create new partnerships which they saw as more appropriate to the education of professionals suited to today's needs. Certainly the preparation of librarians remains centrally important. However, as early as 1994 a small survey conducted in Australia of job advertisements for which information studies graduates could apply, showed that '40 per cent of the potential job market for library and information management professionals required some other primary skill' (Wisdom-Hill 1996: 57, italics in original). In this context, many of those whom Harvey would have us call 'library educators' consider themselves to be the educators of information service professionals, a related, complementary, but not synonymous goal.

It has been observed before that having related disciplines lay claim to activities librarians had formerly thought of as exclusively their own is unsettling (Myburgh and Nimon 2001: 2). It is, however, not a challenge met by ignoring the permeability of the borders of professional work. Rather the argument of a paper given by Myburgh at the International Conference for Library and Information Science Educators in the Asia Pacific Region held in Selangor in Malayasia (Myburgh and Nimon 2001) is that a profound understanding of what our contribution is in the emerging information market, a term used as early as 1987 by Moore, can only be acquired in a multi-disciplinary context.

The discussion so far argues the value of Harvey's paper in causing us to evaluate where we are and where we are going in professional education. Its full value will not be realised until we also construct models of organisational structures and programs which appear to offer us more benefits than those we have at present to guide our progress from this point on.

When engaging in debate, it is essential to be alert to the influences of the techniques we choose as much as the quality and validity of the arguments employed. For example, two opposing positions are commonly adopted in addressing change. The dominant one in secure times is to argue that all we did in the past was wrong and that we must immediately implement a completely new strategy. The other position, dominant when times are uncertain, is to cite the ways in which the present falls short of the past and to argue for the reinstatement of past conditions.

If, however, the solutions of the past were still possible and effective, we would be using them. The past offers insights, not solutions. Thus one immediate challenge is to identify which elements in the education of information professionals are 'core' and constant and how, as circumstances change, we can ensure these elements are inherent in every educational program, no matter how it is delivered.

One response
Preservice education can only achieve limited goals. Any discussion of how preservice education may be improved will be of little value unless it accepts that a preservice qualification may, at best, only equip a graduate for the first few years of work, perhaps a matter of three. Not only will new graduates spend those years learning how to apply their studies in a work context but by the end of that time, if not well before, they will need to supplement learning 'on the job' with some form of content update, be it via training courses or conferences. Indeed, significant though 'on the job' experiential learning may be for newly graduated employees, it is hard to imagine a single one who will not require some formal instruction in content and technique within those three years. Therefore any discussion of preservice education must focus on what is essential to equip the person at the point of entry into the profession and to distinguish it from that which practitioners can learn later.

Preservice education must necessarily be in large measure, an academic exercise. Aspects of knowledge and work skills are analysed and fragmented into units to lead students by steps into complex fields of knowledge. Courses must provide a conceptual and theoretical overview of the field while simultaneously equipping students with the skills they will need to get into the workplace. The difficulty of achieving these two somewhat diverse goals has been accentuated in recent times on the one hand by the pressures to make courses increasingly generic and on the other, by the need of employers to hire people who require little induction into their roles and who can operate very soon after employment as self-managing and reliable professionals who can deliver services with a minimum of supervision. These are not issues that can be dealt with by a group of academic staff alone, of whatever number and composition.

One strategy which may be employed to give librarianship students an understanding of their unique professional base and its positioning within a wide field of information services is for the 'librarianship' staff to seek placements within academic units the disciplines of which complement their own. The next step is to establish course structures by which librarianship students can access subjects taught by others which are contiguous to their core studies and complement them, but which are taught in other units or schools. As indicated above, these two approaches have been employed in the University of South Australia. However, it is clear that these approaches do not offer a uniform pathway for a single cohort of students who emerge with uniform qualifications after a set period of time. Rather they offer core studies with branching pathways that allow graduates to leave the institution with different specialisations. Such an approach is scarcely unique to the University of South Australia. What is asserted here is that the situation is not a deficit one brought about by the decline and fall of a previous empire as implied by Harvey, but an outcome in substantial part planned, sought and fought for by staff who are confident it offers an environment of study that mirrors the liaisons of the present world of work more closely than any library school could. What is also asserted is that such an approach renders impossible any general, facile comparison of the academic stature of students currently admitted into awards leading to professional membership of ALIA with 'librarianship' students of the past. Today's students are admitted under Faculty or Division or even University-wide regulations for undergraduate or postgraduate awards. They may not, therefore, be distinguished from the general student body as 'librarianship' students without careful research. Undergraduates are mainly visible as information studies students at the point of graduation and any measure of the quality of the students at that point would need to consider the impact of the kind of teaching and learning to which they had been exposed as well as the effects of admissions policies.

However, no matter how desirable new internal arrangements in a teaching institution may be, what is vital to effective education is co-operative effort between practitioners and academic staff to provide not merely traditional fieldwork but also promising new ways of teaching and learning. In the United Kingdom, the balance of responsibility for teaching has swung towards practitioners in one major program at the masters' level. Through the University of the West of England, an M Sc in Library and Information 'is taught by practising LIS professionals' (Heery 2001:24). In the same issue of The Australian Library Journal as Harvey's article appeared, a paper by Kallenberger and Todd (2001) reported a significant and exciting initiative in information studies education. The authors cite Dr Kemp, the Federal Minister for Education, who argues for 'a more holistic conception of learning' than that we currently practise. This conception links 'theory with practice' and is one in which 'the academy and professional practice are less demarcated, ... where the lifelong learning continuum is borderless, cumulative and integrated' (2001: 74). Learning conceptualised in this way matches more closely than the study approaches of the past the way in which professionals are called upon to apply a multitude of skills and knowledges in a holistic and flexible manner in the course of any single working day. Routine, repetitive jobs are very rare these days where they exist at all and they do not exist at a professional level. Kallenberger and Todd provide an illustration of a course that demonstrates the qualities they describe as desirable.

Staff from the University of Technology Sydney collaborated with members of the State Library of New South Wales to make it possible for students to undertake study of 'Virtual collections, sources and services' within the context of the operations of a library notable for its provision of virtual information services. Kallenberger and Todd argue persuasively that theirs is an exemplar of how 'rethinking the boundaries of time, place, space, approach and means to learning, and the roles of students in relation to these opportunities' (2001: 73) may result in enhanced student learning. It is also likely that graduates who have had the opportunity to study in ways similar to those described by Kallenberger and Todd will have particularly good interpersonal and communication skills since the context of study requires them to interact with library staff as well as lecturers. There is some evidence that interpersonal and communication skills are increasing as essential criteria for selection by employers (Myburgh and Nimon 2001: 9).

Harvey puts forward the concept of a national scheme for Distributed Library Education (DLE) (p20). This concept has been discussed at least since the ALIA Board of Education Forum held in Canberra in October 1997. Considerable effort has been invested in constructing a platform for a DLE, notably by Dr K Williamson and the team who mounted the Australian Information Studies Schools website. Yet, as Harvey notes, there are many hurdles to be overcome before a DLE becomes effective. However, though it may evolve slowly, a DLE in some form will ultimately emerge because it offers a means by which to maximise use of the nation's resources in terms of academic and professional expertise to provide a broad overview of a constantly evolving world of work and to offer students simultaneously fieldwork and learning contexts that have local relevance.

What is needed now is concrete suggestions on how to implement the next stages of the national Distributed Learning Education network.

Bibliography
Harvey, R (2001) 'Losing the quality battle in Australian education for librarianship' Australian Library Journal, 50 (1) pp15-22.

Heery, M (2001) 'Practitioners as educators: formal quality assessment of the Bristol MSc in Information and Library Management' Library Review, 50 (5) pp249-250.

Kallenberger, N; Todd, R (2001) 'Challenging the boundaries of graduate education for information professionals in Australia: Real world learning for a virtual information world' Australian Library Journal, 50 (1) pp73-86.

Moore, N (1987) The Emerging markets for librarians and information workers. British Library Research Report No 56. London: British Library.

Myburgh, S; Nimon, M (2001) 'Theory with praxis: a rationale for education in information' unpublished paper delivered at the International Conference for Library and Information Science Educators in the Asia Pacific Region, 11-12 June 2001, Selangor, Malaysia.

Wisdom-Hill, J (1966) 'Emerging markets in a networked nation: the role of information managers' in J M Brittain, ed., Introduction to Information Management. Occasional Monograph No 16. Wagga Wagga: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University-Riverina, pp51-70.