They didn't have planes at my graduation. Mind you, they might have done; I didn't acually go

A few times recently I’ve read blog posts about the LIS (or Library & Information Management, or whatever version you want to call it) degree. Mostly this focuses on the Masters, because very few people I know actually have the full under-grad degree (although there are some). A recent post on the excellent Agnostic, Maybe blog has clarified my thinking.

Disclaimer: this is just my view, based on my own experiences of the degree I completed. As always this blog represents my views alone and, god knows, not those of my employer – in fact for this post, just to be on the safe side, this blog doesn’t even represent my own views.

I think the reasons the LIS qualification is most often a Masters are just reasons of convenience. Reason 1: The vast majority of library staff do NOT know they want to join the Information sector at the age of 17, when people are deciding which degree to do. So, if we want people to have degrees, we need them to be able to complete them as something of an after thought, most usually whilst working. Which is to say – it can’t take a full three years, who can wait that long? So it needs to be a Masters, that can be done via Distance Learning if necessary. Reason 2: is there three years of stuff you can teach about library work, really? Really, though? Perhaps if you cover all types of librarianship yes – school, health, academic, business, public, special. But when people realise they need the qualification, they are probably past the primer course stage. The reason which is conspicuous by its absence is: the subject matter and level of learning is at a very advanced level that couldn’t realistically be achieved by an undergraduate.

I think my Masters course was, to all intents and purposes, a 1 year under-grad course. There was not much about it that you could conclusively say: this is POST-GRAD level stuff. It was just latter stages of BA type stuff, with the possible exception of the dissertation – but you don’t NEED to do a super advanced dissertation to get a pass in the Masters. I’ve done another Masters, an MA, so I do know what post-grad study is like – that felt like another level on from my undergraduate learning; my BSc did not. I’m sure this isn’t the case across the board: I’ve heard great things about the course at Sheffield, and obviously the UCL one is supposed to be fantastic as well – but these are both residential and, increasingly, the majority of LIS Masters are coming via Distance Learning courses, so I think my experience may be the norm rather than the exception. Perhaps I’m wrong.

I thought I was just doing the course to get the piece of paper to get a better job – and I was, but actually I learned some really interesting stuff too. But when it comes to an employer assessing me for a role, are they going to know, look into, or even care what I learned on the course? Almost certainly not (I’m in the academic sector; it may be different elsewhere) – for a start the library Masters very quickly becomes out-dated because this field moves so quickly. What the employer needs to know is that I’m the type of person who did the Masters course – which is to say committed to the profession, willing to learn, committed to professional development, ambitious and here for the long haul – not that I learned about Research Methods and wrote a God-awful essay about it.

As part of the big CILIP conversational survey, there was a question about the value of CILIP ratified qualifications. It hadn’t really occurred to me that there could be any kind of library Masters that wasn’t, but I do know that CILIP continued to allow Leeds MET to be a certified course long past the time when any students on it believed it should have been; I don’t think CILIP can have assessed them very thoroughly if they continued to allow the course to run, by all accounts. So I’m not sure there’s value in the Masters being given the CILIP seal of approval either.

The Masters is also extremely expensive – my Distance Learning BSc was twice as expensive as my part-time MA. And as Andy Woodworth (again) just pointed out on Twitter, the course is a one-size-fits-all librarians course which doesn’t specialise in academic or public or any other type of librarianship. One year to study ALL types, even when some of them have almost nothing in common with each other?

So basically we have a system where we ALL, all of us who are working in libraries as a vocation rather than just as a job, have to fork out a fortune for a not-really-that-advanced degree which everyone else has anyway, that has to be a jack of so many sectors it can’t really afford to be a master of any of them, a degree that means you can tick the boxes on the application form but doesn’t actually help you in the interview, and which those outside the library profession are astonished to hear exists at all!

I’m not trying to undermine anyone who has the Masters, I’m not trying to besmirch the good people to teach the courses – I’m not even trying to devalue it, as I’d be very surprised if I apply for any job in the next 50 years which doesn’t list it as a requirement on the person spec. I suppose what I’m trying to say with this post is, why are we all of us complicit in a system that is so obviously unsatisfactory? Employers, employees, CILIP, and library schools.

Is this really a good state of affairs to be happy with? Can we change it? If so, what do we do, what are the alternatives?

-thewikiman

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But Marks & Spencer, on the other hand…

With deliciously free Wifi access, and an achingly gooey selection of online resources wrapped up in gorgeous single sign-in, presented on a bed of modern, bright interior with brightly coloured children’s areas, filled choc-full of tender, flavoursome books, CDs and DVDs and more…

Etc etc.

Anyway, I’m behind. I only get online for short periods of time at the moment. But today I’ve had an hour or so to catch up with the latest headline grabbing library statistics, which equate to a drop in public library use in this country. I’ve got a big old blog post on statistics planned when I get more of an opportunity – in the mean time though, Ian Clark’s piece is essential reading for everyone – read it now! The part of it that is really interesting is statistics from CIPFA show that while library footfall is indeed down, the numbers of web visits is up (from 07/08 to 08/09) by a massive 49%. A hypothesis immediately presents itself – the way people use libraries is changing, they don’t have to visit them so often due to the accessibility that comes with internet access (not least because they can renew book loans online – that alone accounts for a huge amount of library visits no longer necessary), so although visits to the building are down, the use of the library per se is not.

Sadly, the Government – or, to be more specific, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – have NOT chosen to take into account internet access in the report which forms the basis for the recent headlines. Take a look at the report for yourself – you can download the spreadsheets detailing the figures, as well as the actual Word document with all the analysis, here. It’s 2010, yet the report only looks at library use from the point of view of whether its subject, to quote it directly, ‘Has visited a public library in the last year’.

[snarky aside] Guess how I accessed this report? Online. So does that mean that, according to this report’s way of analysing ‘use’, I haven’t read it at all because I didn’t go to Westminster in person and pick up a paper copy?

Buffoons. [/snarky aside]

Anyway, the figures are quite interesting – mainly fairly miserable reading, but the clouds part to let some light through on occasion:

• Black and ethnic minority use of libraries is up since last year (it’s only by less than half a percent, but hey, no one reads the details of these things anyway, right?)
• People who are religious but who don’t classify themselves as Christian’s use of libraries is up since last year (same again with it being by only a tiny amount, but still)
• 11-15 year old girls use the library quite a bit more than they did in 2006/07 when the figures were first collected
• The number of 5 to 10 year olds (of both sexes) who have visited the library ‘in the last we’ek has gone up by more than 20% over last year…

HA! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, doom-mongers! On a serious note, I think that’s encouraging – good to see that even during a down-turn in overall visitation, some minority groups are finding more reasons to visit than before. Incidentally, the report says, more than once, “The decrease in library visits is consistent across all socio-demographic groups.” Maybe I’m missing something, but that seems quite a sweeping statement in light of the stats above. If the report itself glosses over any positives, what hope is there of the headlines picking up on anything other than the negatives? In the same Ian Clark blog post I linked to above, he makes another point I think is interesting, true, and very important: “…the narrative is not being controlled by the profession but by those who either do not understand the service or are trying to undermine it for their own ends.” In this case, the Government itself is undermining the service with a report whose own headline conclusions are apparently determined to see only the negative even where the figures can be seen positively – it doesn’t take much of a cynic to interpret this as a classic Tory ‘softening up’ before they unleash massive cuts. Happy days. How can we take back control of the narrative?

Interestingly, the sample size used to generate the recent, poor figures, are much, much lower than the sample size of the earlier ones. Does that mean the figures are wrong? Probably not, but they are certainly slightly less valid than the original ones – asking 6,000 people about their library use does not represent England nearly as well as asking nearer 30,000. Some of the regions surveyed are only represented by a couple of hundred respondents. Anyway.

Libraries in pubs and supermarkets? Yeah, why not.

Among the proposals the Government are considering is sticking libraries into pubs and supermarkets apparently. This has perhaps understandably met with some derision from the library community. But actually, I think this idea is considering.

Providing the pub and shop branches didn’t replace actual purpose-built libraries, why not take our resources to where the people are already? After all, that’s why social media works so well – that’s why we all love Twitter. Because we’re on Twitter anyway, so the news, views, links etc come to us. So why not follow a similar principle with libraries? Clearly the part of libraries that would easily transport to other venues is mainly going to be the traditional ‘borrow a book’ part – but that’s okay, it will get people interested, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll be tempted to visit the library proper and see what else we have to offer.

Maybe there’ll even be a Halo Effect! (See the comments section of this previous blog post.) So to use the example in that link, the National Archive digitise collections, and then withdraw them from circulation in order to preserve them. They do this on an epic scale; more and more gets digitised every day. The statistical upshot of this is fascinating – physical consultation of the actual collections they digitise goes down (in most cases to near zero), but physical consultation overall goes up. People are finding what they want online, and they get so hooked and interested that they end up requesting other stuff which hasn’t been digitised, so they have to go to TNA to see it in the paper. Digital use and paper use are both way up, together.

Perhaps it is worth, then, trying to embrace the idea of libraries in different places and ensure it’s done well so we can reap any benefits, rather than just assuming it’s a completely hopeless idea…

- thewikiman

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