Just about every librarian job I’ve seen that requires an MLS degree doesn’t accept substitutes. The employer requires a copy of your diploma or transcripts for proof.
If you want to teach in a public school, you don’t a credential immediately, but eventually you are going to have to get one. Private schools have no such requirement.
And being a librarian is nothing like being a lawyer. States have an interest in making sure that people who help the court system run know what they’re doing (supposedly). States don’t get nearly as interested in the operations of libraries.
I know a lovely reference librarian who, in the course of her library career dressed up as a cutsie animal and read books to kids, travelled to Nigeria to help bridge the digital information gap, started up one of the first online reference desks, and worked as an activist regarding such issues as alternative press and the Patriot Act. She was the anthro liason for my university, and her knowledge of anthro was so impressive that I was astounded to learn she only took a few anthro classes in college as an undergrad. If I recall correctly, she was also liason for two other subjects.
I once asked her how she knew so much about so many different subjects, and she said, ‘I read the news.’ I imagine having a master’s degree doesn’t hurt, though.
And I just realized that this is GQ and not MPSIMS. Sorry for the anecdotal evidence. To make up for it I offer this link, which discusses library issues and advocacy (such as the Patriot Act), for your perusal:
I just want to point out that there is another possible degree that librarian schools give out- the MSIS- Master’s of Science in Information Science.
Some of my classmates are a little peeved because they feel it over emphasizes computers over libraries. (Not the coursework, the title. How much computers are emphasized in your courses depends on which courses you take. There is not a lot of uniformity about what courses are required at an ALA accredited school- ALA= America Library Association).
Also, depending on location, one may be able to get a job as a school librarian without that librarian degree but may need to have a teaching certificate- with all the hoops that that requires jumping through.
But one of my professors emphasized in her job hunting lecture that having your MLS, MLIS, MSIS, is like having a union card. Without it you can’t get the professional jobs, but there will be a lot of on-the-job training wherever you go.
And yes, Libraries often have a lot of para-professionals or clerks or other people who don’t have the degree doing various tasks from copy cataloging to reshelving books, to whatever else needs doing.
It’s also true that in very small libraries that are one-person operations, the librarian may need to do everything that needs doing, including the grunt work, but still possess the degrees. So a casual observer might well see a librarian reshelving books and wonder why s/he needs an advanced degree to do that.
In a similar vein, others tend to loosely refer to anyone who works in a library, from a clerk on up, as a “librarian”, and ask the same question about the checkout clerks and reshelving gophers.
As others have said, there’s a lot more to libraries than Dewey: indeed, there is a lot more to classification than Dewey. But there’s also a lot more to Dewey than you can learn in 10 minutes. (I’ve been working with Dewey, one way or another, for about 30 years now, and I’m still learning about it).
For a start, Dewey is published in 4 volumes, with a total of just over 4,000 pages. And it’s updated every month, so there’s new stuff to learn about all. the time. One of the beauties of Dewey is the simple notation, which makes it very easy to use, but there’s a lot behind that notation.
Somebody – I think it was Terry Pratchett – referred to Librarians as the Secret Masters of the Universe – and he wasn’t far wrong!
Today, most people with advanced education are specialists. If you need to know something about the metallurgical properties of rhodium alloys or the courtship customs of the Gond, there’s an expert somewhere that knows that particular area in depth – and has probably produced an erudite monograph or two on it.
We’re drowning in specialized knowledge.
What the world needs is scholarly generalists, who can wade through this plethora of information and organize it so that the person in Xenia, Ohio, with a need to know the average altitude of Sinkiang and how it relates to child development there can retrieve the information from the expert at the University of Almaty who studied child development on the steppes and the scholar in McLean who became an expert on Sinkiang and the Uighurs.
What we’ve got is a set of people, scattered across the world, who have studied information cataloging and retrieval as their career. They’re called professional librarians.
Granted, some – maybe many – are paper pushers, more in love with books than their contents or the people who use them. But the good ones are the key to the use of the knowledge that’s coming out our ears, but without any systematic use of it.
Well, not every person who works with pipes is a fully trained Plumber. Not every person who works in a hospital or medical office is an M.D. And not every person who works in a library is a Librarian.
The full-time professional who runs a given library is no doubt a degreed librarian. If the library is large enough, he/she may have professional staff who are fully-trained librarians under him. But the lady who mans the circulation desk and the guy reshelving books may very well not be – just as the woman who sits at the ward nursing station at the hospital during the wee small hours of the morning may not be a M.D. (though she probably is an R.N., or has one elsewhere in the hospital on call).
In the private sector there are various jobs that may carry the title “librarian” in one form or another, like tape librarian, records librarian, and so on. Usually these jobs are more or less clerical in function and require no degree at all. As far as I know there is no formal statement of opposition to this usage of the title from those who have the degree and work at a professional level, and certainly no laws prohibiting it, as there are with other professions like engineering.
But to work as an actual librarian, you do need the degree, though as noted it may now be called an MIS, MSIS, or whatever. The key requirement is that the degree program has to be approved by the ALA.
I remember wishing we could spend more time on Dewey when we studied it. It was quite a remarkable achievement, even if Dewey was something of a crank (IMO).
OK, one more time- does every " full-time professional who runs a given library" actually have that degree (or a similar). I find it hard to believe that every County & City in the USA would make that particular degree a requirement for “the Librarian”- instead of something more vague likes “a Masters degree in a related field or equivilant”. Not every District requires a teaching degree- not every State Bar requires a law degree. It’s strains credulity to think that every single juristiction in the whole USofA has deceided that no one can run a library without that single exact degree (or that very very similar one). I mean- There are still Counties and such that runs many of such jobs on the “Brother-in law” qualification.
The ALA may be powerful, but I bet any County can just say “No thanks- we write out Jobs like we want.”
I live in a county that has many “brother-in-law” jobs (13,000 population), but I’m the board of directors of the local library and we require a MLS in our librarian job description. We are a rapidly growin county, and our library is a regional facility. Our librarian has to know many, many more things than just how to shelve books. He is also responsible for administration of the facility, hiring and firing of what few employees we have, budgetting (that’s the biggy), and is going to head up the process for building our new facility.
He’s also as looney as all get out, but he was here when I got on the board so I’m learning to work around his “otherness.”
Indeed many localities do hire whomever they want. The American Library Association only gives its approval to library school. There is no such thing as an ALA-accredited library. There are no standards (or if there are, they are rare and likely not enforced) on minimum staffing or who can answer what sort of questions.
A lot of rural libraries don’t have anyone with an MLS degree working there.
But any large scale public library, where the librarians have representation from a union, the librarians will usually oppose any move to hire people without MLS degrees to work as “librarians” and get paid the same.
In most urban and suburban regions, the Reference Librarian position and above, the librarians have an MLS. In smaller and/or poorer systems, the Branch Managers and above have degrees.
You listed having to take one… I was required to take Reference and Cataloging. My courses (at UNC-CH) taught:
Designing, running and troubleshooting websites and databases
Running a cataloging system
SEARCHING (If anyone could effectively search the net, I wouldn’t be considered “super librarian” among my peergroup because I can find a demanded Simpsons quote in under 60 seconds)
Managing a library, including dealing with vendors, the government, and patrons
Designing and implimenting preservation programs
Writing grants
Recommending materials for three-year-olds who like horses and 40-year-olds seeking divorce.
Polycarp, your post is beautiful. As a librarian, I know how to search, organize, and condense information. As a librarian at my current job, I know how to search, organize, and condense information about manufacturing industries worldwide. I know I could walk into any job, from church management to pharmaceuticals to the local library’s youth program and do the same thing. I don’t know if it’s the library degree, or the type of personality the library degree attracts.
Eve, the outlook for librarians is very good, no matter what kind of librarian you wish to be.
The degree can be anything from MLS, MIS, MLIS and the one I’ve got, the MSLIS. I’m sure there are other variations, too.
Why is the degree necessary to be a librarian? So you get a feel for the issues inherent in organizing information and providing access to it. If a library ran on as simple a system as a video store, then it’d be no big deal. But, libraries are a lot more complex, as the posters above have shown.
So, I felt as if most of my library school classes were about inculcation. “This is what a librarian does, this is how a librarian thinks and soon you’ll be a librarian, too. Join us! Come to the dark side!” The classes were pretty easy, IMHO. I’d just come from getting a MA in English Lit, and the MSLIS was my recreational degree. I learned the most from working as a student & graduate assistant at a whole host of different libraries. I had a few really good classes, too, but I’m more of an experiential learner so the assistantships were where I really started to get what the whole librarian thing was about.
Recreational or not, that degree got me a starting salary of 28K in 1998. My next job started at 32K and was 34K by the time I left 3 years later. My 3rd job was 43K. And now, after being a librarian for 8 years, I’m at 49K in my 4th job. (This one’s a long term position – no more visting professorships for me!) Granted, I’m an academic librarian at a small, liberal arts college, so I’m really lucky in the salary department. But, I had to move around the country A LOT to get to this point. Still, why do you need the library school degree? To get a job that pays well in a service industry that values intellectual pursuits. Can’t beat it.
My first paid job ever, back in the 60s, was with the Melvil Dewey Library, located eight miles from where he was born and named for him for obvious reasons.
In classic irony, they used the L.C. cataloging system. :smack:
Another vital part of library science is information denial. When you only have a limited budget and shelf space, it’s important to make every library look like every other library, with the same 10 books on the Napoleonic Wars. And since the main competition is big box bookstores, have 20 copies of the latest bestseller to draw in the crowds.
