Stepping Up Shaping the Future of the Field

DRAFT – January 5, 2005 As they say in Congress, I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks… This is still emerging, and I will continue working on it to make sure it does what I want and that it fits in the time allotted I am now sending it to colleagues who are part of the ALISE Plenary discussion, including Toni Carbo, Fiona Black, Pru Dalrymple and Deanna Marcum, all of whom are on the platform with me, and some other folks who’ve helped me with this effort Stepping Up: Shaping the Future of the Field John Leslie King Dean and Professor School of Information University of Michigan Ann Arbor MI 48103 jlking@umich.edu Respect – I would like to start with some comments about this to set the stage There are two related notions relevant here The first is civility, which is defined as courteous behavior, politeness, formal or perfunctory regard; sufficiently observing or befitting accepted social usages; not rude It’s from the Latin civis, or citizen I not refer to this: the LIS field, in my experience, is remarkably civil Perhaps in some cases, too civil for its own good Sometimes things need to be confronted with a little venom if they are to be dealt with as necessary The other is respect, which is to feel or show deferential regard for; to esteem; to relate or refer to; concern It is from the Latin respectus, past participle of respicere, to look back at, to regard This is the issue I want to focus on I don’t believe this field – or any field – can make progress without recognizing and honoring the concept of respect Throughout this talk I will remain respectful But that does not mean I will be gentle I believe that the LIS field is shaking itself up, but not nearly as much as it needs to I did not come here to dampen the rhetoric; I came to turn up the gain I have three themes I’m going to focus on: Confidence, Opportunity, and Assertion I’ll deal with them in that order I’ll start my discussion of confidence by talking about crisis There is a persistent discourse of crisis in the LIS field I’ve been hearing it for 15 years, since I was University Librarian at UC Irvine Since joining a program with a long tradition in LIS in 2000, I’ve learned that this discourse goes back a long, long way I don’t mean to discount the concerns people have about the LIS field – there is good reason to think the field is in crisis But it is easy to get carried away with contemporary crises Not only is the crisis discourse an old one in the LIS field, it is a common one in many academic fields I spent 30 years in computer science and information systems before going to Michigan, and I remain a player in both fields Those fields have been in crisis since I started working in them in the early 1970’s While many of the concerns of computer science and information systems differ from those of the LIS field, the overall patterns are similar The biggest concern shared by all three takes me back to where I started this talk – respect, or more specifically, lack of respect Let’s make this a little more concrete by looking at one of the most commonly cited metrics of respect in our society – money, or more specifically, compensation The data here show median salaries from a number of fields Field Software engineers Economists Human resource managers Physician Assistants Computer Programmers Physical Therapists Architects Budget analysts Registered Nurses Multi-media artists Librarians School Teachers Medical Social Workers Graphic Designers Archivists and Curators General Social Workers Salary 70,900 68,550 64,710 64,670 60,290 57,330 56,620 52,480 48,090 43,980 43,090 42,075 37,380 36,680 35,270 33,150 Comparative Salaries from Several Fields Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook 2002 data for salaried workers only Librarians are clearly below the middle of this set, at about 2/3 the salary of the top group shown here – software engineers On the plus side, librarians make about 1/4 more than those in the lowest paid group – general social workers – but a big chunk of workers that many of us feel are kindred souls – archivists and curators – are also down at that low level The data are even more revealing when one looks just at those fields from this list that typically require at least a Masters degree for entry into the profession The data below show this set of professions Field Economists Physician Assistants Librarians Medical Social Workers Archivists and Curators Salary 68,550 64,670 43,090 37,380 35,270 Comparative Salaries from Several Fields Requiring Masters Education on Entry Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook 2002 data for salaried workers only The notable story is what’s missing: a large number of quite high-paying jobs from the previous table that not require any graduate education, at all When one brings back into the equation those professional fields that require a total of five to seven years of combined undergraduate and graduate education, the results are quite stark Field MBA D Pharmacy MS Electrical Engineering JD Law MS Civil Engineering MLS Librarian Median Starting Salary 84,000 66,210 64,556 60,000 47,245 37,450 Comparative Salaries from Several Fields Requiring 5-7 Years of Education Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook 2002 data for salaried workers only I want to make two comments about these data The first is a response to those who wonder why in the world computer science or information systems would feel a lack of respect, given the fact that salaries in those fields are quite high The short answer is that computer science and information systems salaries are lower than many of the comparable areas of work with which computer scientists and information systems specialists compare themselves – for example, MBAs who specialize in information systems make a lot less than those specializing in finance In addition, computer science and information systems have long been looked down on by academic colleagues in nearby areas of work, such as mechanical engineering and general management Salary isn’t everything – but it is something, and it has been an issue in the LIS field Beyond this, I want to point to a practical fact that many of us face in the LIS education business I’ll start with the view from Michigan, because our case illustrates the point so well Nearly 3/4 of the graduate students in our program at SI are from out of state Out of state tuition at Michigan is really expensive – around $45,000 for the two-year program It is not easy to recruit world-class students into a professional masters program where the gross salary they are likely to get upon graduation is less than what they spent on tuition alone We get good students to come to SI, but they tend to be in two curious classes The first is the martyrs, who know the salaries are low and the librarian’s lot is to suffer, but they want to that kind of work so they come anyway The other class are students who come to SI with expectations to work in other areas of our program where salaries are higher, then discover once in the program that they really liked the library world and are willing to accept it as it is This is a bad situation for our schools, for the field of librarianship, and for the larger society that needs people who this work I’m sure many of you are thinking that this whole story is a sad commentary on the increasingly materialistic nature of our society – and I agree 100% But this is where we live, and clicking our tongues over how things ought to be different isn’t going to help No matter how we slice it, the salary situation is a problem for the LIS field It creates practical problems for our schools, and it systematically undervalues and marginalizes the importance of this kind of work The salary situation calls into the foreground what I have found to be the most deeply felt and persistent rubric in the LIS field: that the world at large seems to be ignorant of or hostile to the enterprise of libraries that is so deeply important to human welfare, and that this situation is growing worse It would be one thing if the LIS field were merely crying in its beer, bemoaning the lack of respect and worrying about our jobs or the jobs of our graduates It’s a far more serious matter to believe – as I think everyone in this room does – that the work of the LIS field is fundamentally important to the future The problems of respect and low salaries and so forth are not merely threats to individuals: they are threats to what people want to and need to believe in So, let’s summarize the cavalcade of crises that the LIS field faces The list below is a start; drag a piece of crisis flypaper through some of the chat groups and listservs in the LIS field and many more could be added • The Library Funding Crisis Library funding is seen to be in jeopardy This seems • • • to be for one of three reasons: a general decline in overall funding for libraries; a relative decline in funding given the additional demands created by changes such as collecting in both print and digital form; and irregular funding in which some libraries are doing well and others are nearing collapse While not directly touching on LIS education, per se, this is obviously a concern The “No Respect” Crisis This is a rather old issue, but it is persistent The closing of library schools between 1970 and 2000 was taken as evidence that the LIS field has little respect within the academy, and there has been considerable commentary on this matter Another source of evidence has been the comparatively low salaries that highly educated professional librarians receive compared to fields of equivalent educational requirement The Practice/Education Crisis This generally takes the form that LIS education is on the wrong track with respect to library practice; that LIS students are not getting taught the right things or that they are getting taught the wrong things This accusation is typically leveled by people in practice against people in the LIS education business The L-School/I-School Crisis This arose when some schools engaged in LIS education dropped the word “Library” from their names More broadly, the concern is that the emergent schools that focus more broadly on information issues (the I-Schools) are a threat to more traditional LIS schools, because the ISchools plan to either abandon or conquer the LIS schools It’s a good list – there’s plenty to be worried about here, if one is inclined to worry Personally, I don’t find worrying to be very useful When I look at this list, and especially when I reflect on what I’ve learned about the LIS field in the past 15 years or so, I have a particular view of the whole crisis rubric I think the only real crisis in this field is a crisis of confidence And I think it has to end, if not for ourselves and for our students, then for the world that needs our attention and our help In general, I would rather be part of the solution than part of the problem It does not help those who are worried about the LIS field for me to respond with a cheerful “Don’t worry, be happy!” So I won’t Instead, I’ll attempt to put some context around the crisis rubric, and recast the challenges of the field in a new way I am not suggesting that people in the LIS field must come at things this way: I’m merely suggesting that we can so, and that we should make the effort The first point I’d like to make is that the field of LIS education was born from crisis, and has been a child of crisis since its conception There were a handful of programs for training librarians before the era of the Carnegie Libraries It was the creation of those 2,800 libraries that resulted in a crisis in LIS education The Williamson Report, prepared toward the end of the era of Carnegie Library construction between 1919 and 1921, was a response to what, in retrospect, seems obvious: buildings full of books don’t run themselves The problem was what economists call the complementary asset problem – you can’t get what you want until you have all of what you need The Carnegie Corporation, which had repeatedly refused the entreaties of Joseph Daniels of the Riverside Public Library in California to support his fledgling library training program – finally commissioned Charles Williamson to evaluate education for librarianship in the United States Williamson’s efforts, the results of which were endorsed by the ALA and published widely in 1923, gave rise to many of the programs we now count as central in LIS education For example, the program at Michigan started in 1926, and only after William Warner Bishop threatened the U-M Regents that he was going to leave and go to Columbia University, where Melvyl Dewey had started his early program in 1887 The LIS education field arose from crisis Why would we disown that heritage? I will argue further that crisis has been at the heart of the LIS field all along We all know that the field of librarianship has been at the forefront of many important social movements, not the least of which is opposition to racial and gender discrimination Again, citing just the history of my own school, William Warner Bishop was a forceful advocate for opening opportunities of professional work in the library field to women and people of color Far more significant are the efforts of the heroes and heroines of the library field, educated in our schools, who stood firm against the vulgar curse of racial hatred and gender discrimination that were foundations of the very communities in which they lived These people – many of them women – risked reputation, livelihood, and even their lives to change those communities If this is not crisis, by what definition we make meaning of that word? Similarly, but in a very different vein, librarians were among the first to recognize and act upon the tremendous challenge that computer-based automation posed for the whole realm of information and knowledge We all know about the glories of OCLC, and they are glorious, indeed But these glories are built upon hundreds of smaller insights and innovations that made the Herculean task of getting the world of knowledge under control, so it could be harnessed and put to use to better the human condition This has always been a crisis situation, in which the benefits of a world that might be were pitted against the incumbent interests of a world that is now The LIS field did not shy away from that crisis: it embraced it and rode that wild thing until it got it under control What’s happened between then and now? To read the contemporary rhetoric of crisis in the LIS field, one is left with the impression that there was once a Golden Age of LIS from which we – whoever the bad guys are in this drama – have fallen I don’t think there was ever a Golden Age, and I challenge anyone who thinks there was to produce evidence to support the claim Instead, I think there the LIS field was born of the Age of Enterprise This was not an era of accomplishment, but an era of striving To give you a sense of what I mean, let me return to the story of the Carnegie Libraries, and the social movement that give rise to the realm of LIS education we know today You all know something about the Carnegie Libraries I want to delve a little deeper into that story Andrew Carnegie came to the US from Scotland as a boy of 13 He was, literally, a self-made man, an innovator While he wasn’t the first steel maker to adopt the hugely important Bessemer process, which cut the cost of making steel by an order of magnitude, he was the first to introduce efficiency and cost controls, thus making Carnegie Steel the world’s most efficient steel producer He became history’s first billionaire he sold Carnegie Steel to the tycoon J.P Morgan, creating United States Steel in 1901 Carnegie was the second richest person in American history, behind John D Rockefeller Carnegie’s wealth has been estimated at 100 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars He gave almost all of that money away By contrast, Bill Gates is ranked the fifth wealthiest person in American history at $61 billion He has not given it all away Andrew Carnegie gave away more than Bill Gates has Moreover, Carnegie gave to purposes that he felt would help the average person Most of that money went to libraries Why? Carnegie’s own words, written in 1889, give some sense of his aspirations: "I think it fruitful in the extreme, because the library gives nothing for nothing, because it helps only those that help themselves, because it does not sap the foundation of manly independence, because it does not pauperize, because it stretches a hand to the aspiring and places a ladder upon which they can only ascend by doing the climbing themselves This is not charity, this is not philanthropy, it is the people themselves helping themselves by taxing themselves." This was the Age of Enterprise Carnegie confronted a world filled with cruel realities – the subjugation of women and minorities, the brutal cruelty of infant and child mortality and an average life span, in even the most advanced countries, of less than 50 years He was not willing to stand down in the face of that cruelty He stood against it, and by his benefaction, he enabled us to so as well I don’t want to paint Andrew Carnegie as a saint – he was not a saint He was a mean son of a bitch But he was not afraid to confront the meanness of the world around him He did not know the path to salvation, but he believed that people, once empowered, would find that path Lord Acton, who gave us the famous dictate, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is also reported to have said something very telling about the nature of social institutions In speaking of the decline of the Church of England, he said, as a general rule, institutions fail as a result of overzealous adherence to their own first principles I think this is important for the LIS field For one thing, I call into question what the first principles of the LIS field are Do you know what they are? I don’t So let’s broaden our gaze a bit and ask ourselves what they might be An interesting place to look would be the Report of the Core Values Task Force II of the American Library Association Congress on Professional Education, as reported at the ALA Annual Conference in 2001 What we find are ten core values: • • Access Collaboration • • • • • • • • Diversity Education Intellectual Freedom Preservation Privacy Professionalism Public Good Service To tell the truth, I don’t have any problem with these – they are all good things to list as core values, or first principles But when I think about Andrew Carnegie’s words, I wonder why the following list of ten core values are not included: • • • • • • • • • • Wisdom Compassion Knowledge Freedom Justice Empowerment Prosperity Beauty Innovation Courage Nothing in the first set excludes things in the second set But when I look at the second set in contrast to the first set, I see something important and disturbing The first set is mostly about means, not ends, and it is largely defensive We will defend the right of access, we will defend intellectual freedom, we will defend privacy… The second list is quite different: it consists of conditions and objectives We will be courageous and innovative in pursuit of beauty, prosperity, justice, freedom, knowledge I reiterate, these two lists are in no way contradictory of one-another They just put different things in the foreground Now, some might say that the role of the LIS field is to prepare people to seek the things on the first list in order to allow the society to accomplish the things on the second Fair enough… But let me ask you this: which list makes you want to fight? Which list would make you willing to die? It might very well be that doing the things on the first list is necessary to accomplishing the things on the second list But does that make them “core values” for our enterprise? I certainly hope not Let’s go back to Andrew Carnegie He published the words I quoted in late 1889 – almost exactly 115 years ago What has changed in the intervening 115 years? Most of us will immediately respond that there have been huge technological changes, and that is important But not nearly as important as some other things relevant to our discussion As I noted earlier, public libraries as we know them today, as well as LIS education that supports the library world, have both emerged since 1889 And, along the way, universal suffrage and civil rights reform came to be We are nowhere near where we must be on these issues, but we are far, far removed from where we were Literacy grew from 90% to 99% among whites in our population during this time – you all know the 90/10 rule And certainly more serious, literacy grew from 53% to 98% among people of color during this time We can quibble about what we mean by literacy, but is there anyone in this room who thinks we have not made huge strides in American literacy in the last 115 years? We also have seen growth of 1000% an order of magnitude increase – in personal income during this time And perhaps most important for the deep story here, there has been a phenomenon shown in the figure below known as the “rectangularization of mortality.” This is a concept developed by Jamie Fries, a professor medicine at Stanford During the 20th century human life span in the US and other developed countries increased by about 50% due to progress on combating infectious disease, cancer, cardiovascular problems, and other causes of death The curve representing mortality, which was a steep drop downward to the right creating the hypotenuse of a triangle in 1900, shifted outward and upward to the right until the area under the curve was almost rectangular by the end of the century What is not shown in this picture, but is clearly implied, is that the average years at work of the population doubled during the 20th century When you couple this with the growth in the working-age population as well as labor productivity quadrupled during that period, and that capital investment increased by a factor of ten, it becomes clear that the 20th century saw the largest increase in human capability ever known The world is still confronted with many perils, and we are far from global security and the dreamed-of palindrome, “want of fear of want,” but we are far closer than we have ever been before The Rectangularization of Mortality Source: Fries, 1980 At this point, I think it useful to confront a pernicious and costly myth about the world of libraries It is common to refer to libraries as part of the class known as “cultural institutions.” This is the bias of the Research Libraries Group, a community of elite institutions from the world of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries (full disclosure: the University of Michigan is a member) The implication of this appellation is that libraries are the consequence of a prosperous and cultured society Under this model, prosperity gives rise to sufficient social surplus to create and sustain institutions that reflect and nurture culture I find this notion fundamentally backwards Libraries are not the consequence of progress and prosperity, they are the cause of progress and prosperity I’m not blowing smoke here A couple of years ago Margaret Hedstrom and I did a study for the OECD of the role of libraries, archives and museums in the creation and maintenance of knowledge communities It became clear in our research that the creation of key collections in Europe in the 16th century preceded and were essential to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, upon which the foundations of the modern era were built This was Carnegie’s point in 1889 We don’t build libraries because we are prosperous and successful: we build them because we want to become prosperous and successful Well, we built a lot of libraries in the past 115 years, and we staffed them with a lot of librarians who graduated from our LIS programs If we were following Andrew Carnegie’s sense of things, we did it for a purpose – to facilitate human aspiration and endeavor The result, looking back, seems pretty clear to me: We won! So, now what? Is the game over? I don’t think so We’ve conquered many challenges in the last 115 years, but we’ve also learned a lot about the nature of challenge itself The list of challenges remains long Just to pick a few facts out of the air: • Between and billion people in the world are illiterate • Between and billion people in the world are poverty-stricken 10 • Between and billion people in the world live without political freedom These are not independent factors: they are correlated with one another Here’s something you might be interested to know: today’s population of illiterate people is greater than the entire population of the world in 1900 Is the work of the LIS field done? Illiteracy and poverty are closely linked Look no further for proof than Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, of the season lately passed Recall that the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two decrepit children hidden beneath his cloak About them he says, “This boy is Ignorance This girl is Want Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” Are these words any less true for having been written in 1843? Indeed, I think since then we have learned how true they really are We have far to go, but we have come far as well Before us lie great opportunities unforeseen even a generation ago There are more than billion people with access to the Internet today This is an increase of three orders of magnitude in just 10 years Even more astonishing, nearly half of the world’s population now has access to telephony as a result of the lightning fast spread of wireless technology This is an increase of more than four orders of magnitude in 10 years This is a harbinger of general information access, because the most powerful historical predictor of access to computing is access to telephony We are rapidly entering an era when most of the world’s population can gain access to knowledge in ways that Andrew Carnegie only dreamed of in 1889, and then only for the population of the United States – already the world’s richest nation We all know that the channels provided by telephones and computers are not enough: there has to be something at the other end In this we are also making tremendous progress The amount of content that is “born digital” is growing daily, and with recent announcements, we now realize that the vast majority of printed human knowledge will be accessible in digital form far sooner than we might have imagined even five years ago I recently took a web-based tour of institutions that fit nicely under the rubric of CI – for critical infrastructure and cultural institutions My objective was to see what kinds of activities were going on under the signifier, “digital library.” It is a remarkable array of institutions, with nearly every recognizable name involved More to the point, however, is something we have learned at Michigan with two modest projects that are part of the digital library phenomenon One was JSTOR, a project of the Mellon Foundation that emerged at the University of Michigan, and that, until last January, was administered by the School of Information JSTOR was a huge success for the most unlikely and unpredictable reason: the fall of the Soviet Union East-bloc universities in the Soviet era were very good, considering the challenges they faced, but they could never be great because they did not have access to 11 scholarly information For political and economic reasons, they could not build their collections The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, right about the time JSTOR was beginning As these universities gained strength in their new liberation, JSTOR was building the capability and capacity to serve as the global repository of the scholarly record When JSTOR began its membership service, it was swamped by the former Eastbloc universities who instantly realized that they could leap-frog the traditional need to build up their print collections Since that time, JSTOR has become a vital resource for global higher education, and the most successful thing of its kind in history None of this was planned, but it happened nonetheless A similar but more modest experience is found in the Internet Public Library, a project born in SI that is now being moved out into the ownership of a consortium of LIS schools and public libraries A couple of years ago, wanting to be modern and “brand” the IPL with the School of Information’s identity, we changed the IPL front page to be less generic and more specific about our school and the University of Michigan Immediately thereafter, use dropped significantly We were puzzled by this until we realized that the IPL had become the de facto web site of many small, public libraries that could not afford to run their own site They put up a home page for their library that, upon access by a user, automatically linked to the generic IPL The user did not know that the IPL was not their home library’s web site – they just used it as though it was In our haste to “brand” the IPL, we deprived our colleagues in these libraries of a resource that surely brought more value to the world than any value we might have received from the branding This humbled us It is not that we were wrong in our intentions Rather, we were wrong in failing to comprehend the opportunity before us We stand at the threshold of a new world, as exciting and beautiful as any we have seen before And, I should add, we have seen such excitement and beauty in the past, in the roots of our very own enterprise I want to touch on two examples of this, one from a thousand years ago, and another from 500 years ago We all recognize that much of the strenght of western civilization derives from the insights and wisdom of ancient Greece The west would never have seen that wisdom without the intermediation of classical Islamic culture The Umayyad Dynasty of Al Andalus what we now know as Spain was established by Islamic invaders from Northern Africa in the 8th century Between the 9th and 11th centuries, this dynasty created one of the world’s greatest libraries of ancient Greek and Arab learning at Toledo This wasn’t an accident: Toledo had long been a center of civic progress the Visigoth Code of Law, an important precursor to western jurisprudence, was developed there When the Christian forces of Alphonso VI conquered Toledo in 1085, the great library was intact From the 12th to the 15th century, the library was translated into Latin and became part of the foundation of knowledge that led to the European Renaissance About five hundred years ago, Johann Gutenberg built the first moveable type printing press and used it to publish the first Bible This created a huge crisis in Christian Europe, 12 threatening the authority of the Church In 1462, the Archbishop of Mainz – the center of printing skills – ordered an attack on the printers that resulted in their dispersion throughout Northern Europe and England Printing was well established by the time Martin Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, which led to the Counter-Reformation launched at the Diet of Worms in 1521 By the mid-16th century it was clear that the Reformation was not going to go away, and in an historically critical move, the Roman Catholic Church decreed at the Council of Trent in 1545 that Catholic Priests henceforth must be fully literate – as the clergy of the Reformation was, following Luther’s lead Thus began the vital tradition of the Christian Church in the promotion of literacy, a tradition which dominated global efforts toward general literacy for three centuries At the same time, the mid-16th century saw the expansion of printing and literacy give rise to the concept of copyright through the establishment of depository laws throughout Europe, as well as the rapid growth of collections in the form of libraries and museums These, in turn, were directly responsible for the intellectual breakthroughs of the 17th century that displaced scholasticism, which focused all higher learning on the nature of God and man’s relationship with God, toward the modern concept of the sciences and letters that focus on the nature of man and man’s relationship with the natural world Both of these are stories of access, the top entry on the ALA’s list of core values for professional education The Library at Toledo held the knowledge that would lead to the Renaissance, but that information was inaccessible Access to that information changed the world Similarly, the invention of printing was a powerful tool in Luther’s effort to disintermediate the clergy from the relationship between the individual and God, and by disintermediating salvation, the Reformation opened the door to the disintermediation of literate elites from the relationship between the common person and knowledge As Carnegie’s comments on the library suggest, and as the 115 years since he wrote them verify, access to knowledge is about empowerment That’s why this field exists, and that it is still what it is about today The story of LIS education has always been about opportunity, and it is still about opportunity Global illiteracy and poverty can be licked It will not be easy, certainly, but that prospect today is no more daunting than the prospect of 115 years ago that motivated Carnegie to endow libraries The technologies of books and buildings, and the expertise to put them to work, was no different in enabling that endeavor than are the technologies of digital content and global information technology today We have always had to figure out things as we go, and today is no different Learning-by-doing is the only road forward The LIS field lies at the center of this opportunity It is time for the field move from reaction to assertion I submit that this ongoing crisis of confidence is a waste of time that neither the LIS field or the world at large can afford, given the magnitude of the opportunity before us We must step up to these challenges And, in fact, we have already started That is why people are so worried! Change is frightening, especially in the face of the unknown The revolution is underway, and we better start following if 13 we’re going to start leading I said earlier that I prefer to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem I might achieve this objective by picking up the thread of the crises I mentioned and using them to demonstrate what it means to lead Let’s start with the “retirement crisis.” You know the drill on this one: a hiring bulge in the 1970’s is passing through the system, and there will be many retirements in the near future In the mean time, production has dropped off and there will be fewer people to fill those positions Whether are not this is a real problem is subject to debate, but I don’t want to get into that here Let’s assume its as bad as the darkest fears suggest Using some simple economics, I can convert this from a crisis into an opportunity I say, Bring it on! Econ 101 teaches that price is related to supply and demand, and the appropriate price for something will be found where the supply and demand curves intersect If the supply goes up and/or demand goes down, the price will fall, and vice versa The “retirement crisis” is a case of rising demand and declining supply Prices – in this case wages – must be expected to rise Well, isn’t that what we want – to see the wages of librarians go up? What’s not to like about this? The short answer that most of you will give me is that there is insufficient money to pay the higher wages and still get all the work done This is, of course, the heart of the “library funding” crisis So, what’s broken here? Is it them – meaning the Philistines who don’t realize how important it is to society to pay for libraries? Or is it “it” – meaning the model we’ve been following for funding lo these many years? I say it’s “it.” Go back to my point about libraries as cultural institutions vs libraries as critical infrastructure As I said, I think libraries are part of what creates the surplus, not something that lives off the surplus But in many ways, this view is fundamentally at odds with the Public Goods model on which the funding of libraries has long been based Even if libraries were once a good example of true public goods, they are aren’t any more I won’t go into the details on this accusation; we can discuss that later if you like My point here is that the Public Goods model for library funding is failing politically because it is failing conceptually and practically – that dog just won’t hunt any more There is a grave need for new economic and business models for the funding of libraries, but very few people in this field know how to to think about this problem The LIS field itself must be the research leaders in this area Right now, it is are not It is far too dependent on people outside the field who really not understand this field in its depth or significance This brings me to the most important factor facing the library world: productivity The library world has been cursed for a long time by something known as Baumol’s Disease This is a problem identified in the mid-1960’s by the economist William Baumol In short, it is the problem that emerges when some sectors of the economy undergo great productivity increases – as we have seen in agriculture, manufacturing, and distribution – whiles others not Productivity improvement tends to result in rising labor rates, and when the wages of the economy at large rise because many fields are experiencing 14 improved productivity, this puts great pressure on the wages of fields without productivity improvement The fields with the slowest productivity improvement have been high-skill service fields The example Baumol used was high-level musical performance: even after 400 years, it still takes four skilled musicians to play a string quartet Other fields with this problem include health care, education, and – you guessed it – librarianship, museum curation, archival work, and so on Some areas of health care have seen rising wages for the simple reason that people hate being sick and they don’t want to die But the consequence has been soaring health care costs, now about 16% of GDP and headed for 20% In other fields, however, wages have not risen And they are not going to rise until productivity improvement begins The good news is that there is recent evidence to show that Baumol’s Disease can be pushed back, even in fields that traditionally have resisted productivity improvement The answer is improved techniques and technologies involving information Lest you think that the fields of interest to LIS are resistant, let me show you three examples to the contrary All three have roots in my school at Michigan – I am using these only because I know them well enough to so I’m sure there are many others Two of these I have already mentioned: JSTOR and the IPL I have mentioned them already in the context of digital libraries, but I didn’t point out that they are fundamentally examples of productivity improvement The IPL has leveraged the productivity of academic librarians all over the world by providing a place to which they can refer users for certain kinds of information Similarly, JSTOR had a profound productivity improving effect on access to back-issues of scholarly publications that lowered the cost of access to many of the world’s comparatively impoverished institutions of higher education The third is familiar to everyone here, but you might think it surprising that I bring it up It is the Cataloging in Publication program of the Library of Congress, in which cataloging information was printed directly into books This had a huge productivity impact on libraries, allowing the work of a small number of catalogers to substitute for the work previously done by many thousands This is a process improvement No computer technology was involved Productivity improvement is not necessarily synonymous with automation It just means getting more output out of the inputs Turning now to issues that lie more within our field, there is the “core curriculum” crisis This is the one where practitioners claim that educators are misbehaving It’s not quite as strong as the leaders of Athens accusing Socrates of corrupting the youth of the city, but there’s something of that flavor in the things I’ve read recently Let me begin my comments on this crisis by taking a very clear position with respect to one suggested remedy: reform of the accreditation process My advice to would-be reformers is simple: don’t go there Even if I agreed that there is trouble with the core curriculum – and I don’t – this would not be the way to proceed The ecology of accreditation simply will not permit this strategy to work There is a simple but brutal truth to all academic accreditation efforts, and this truth applies to accreditation in the LIS field: elite 15 educational institutions accredit accreditation processes, and those accreditation process, in turn, accredit less elite educational institutions Any accreditation process that alienates the elite institutions will fail, and any effort to reform LIS accreditation to start mandating what should be taught will be rejected by the elite institutions Put simply, such reforms will either fail by being justly rejected, or they will fail because they will drive away the elite institutions (who don’t really need accreditation) and the whole accreditation enterprise will collapse The evidence of this lies all around Every significant professional accreditation organization –ALA that accredits law schools, AACSB that accredits business schools, ABET that accredits engineering schools, and many others – have rejected the model that dictates what schools must teach Instead, they have embraced the model in which the schools specify what they are trying to accomplish, and how they are doing so, with evidence to back up success in the outcomes Incidentally, this is also the model for all contemporary industrial quality assurance programs, including the Baldridge Awards and the ISO 9000 regime and its successors This strategy works; the alternative does not Irrespective of the accreditation issue, there is something fundamentally wrong about the idea that a “one size fits all” solution will accomplish what we are trying to in LIS education That cannot happen because too many important things are changing very rapidly This is a period in which the ideal of the “canon” must give way to the ideal of experimentation There is a great quote attributed to Marvin Minsky: when you don’t know what to do, lots of things That is what we should be doing in this field, and guess what – that is what we already are doing To those who say that LIS education has diversified and moved away from the core curriculum of the mythical Golden Age, I have only one reply – it’s about time! Finally, I want to address a crisis that has all the makings of a Hatfields and McCoys cartoon the feud between the L-schools and the I-schools This is often invoked by the fact that a number of schools that grew out of the LIS tradition have taken the word “Library” out of their names over the past couple of decades In fact, the literature of the ALA Congress on Professional Education describes this as a key motivation for their effort What’s in a name? More than meets the eye Wittgenstein pointed out that real trouble begins when people take perfectly sensible and useful words and turn them into names This process is the heart of what he described as “language games,” in which routine linguist use corrupts meaning and sows the seeds of misunderstanding The notion that inclusion or exclusion of the word “library” from the names of our schools signifies something important about what’s really going on inside our schools is just plain wrong Don’t take my word for it – look at the evidence The KALIPER project, which might well be the most important study of LIS education since the Williamson study, shows clearly that nearly all the schools studied – whether they had the “L-word” or not – were innovating dramatically in curriculum and research In many cases, there were patterns seen across all the schools that some would attribute only to L-Schools and others would attribute only to I-Schools I am not saying that the decision to include or exclude the word “library” in a school’s name is immaterial at the point the decision is 16 made People change names for good reasons, usually to signify something important to them What I am saying is that we are wasting a lot of valuable energy and effort squabbling over this because of some baseless assumptions about what it all means You all know that I am from an I-school Don’t blame me for the name of my school – it was changed before I got there Since I arrived at SI in 2000, I’ve had the chance to work with many colleagues across the LIS landscape, in both L-Schools and I-Schools I’ve heard a lot about this purported feud Frankly, I don’t think the feud even exists Among my I-School colleagues – the deans, anyway – I’ve been impressed by the sense of inclusion with the LIS tradition This shows up even among deans who did not come out of the LIS tradition We made a decision among ourselves that we would not leave ALISE Strangely, however, there are some who think the I-schools are abandoning the LIS tradition What evidence they have to show for this? Sometimes they mention Berkeley, and I agree that the situation at Berkeley is problematic But there are people from Berkeley who come to ALISE What happened at Berkeley is not a trend: it’s simply a mistake Mistakes happen It might be profligate, but it’s not prophetic A couple of years ago I had a chance to discuss at length the creation of SI at Michigan with the person who was Provost at Chicago when the graduate library school – the first in the world to offer a Ph.D in 1928 – was closed He told me that he felt in retrospect that Chicago had made a mistake in closing the school What happened at Berkeley – or at Chicago for that matter – must not be taken as harbingers of anything They are a consequence of rapid change in a time of uncertainty I want to move toward a conclusion with a topic that is uniquely within the province of the LIS education realm This is the tightly coupled relationship between knowledge discovery and knowledge dissemination that concerns instructional programs in higher education When I read some of the recent discourse on the crises of LIS education, I’m struck by the undercurrent of a tired old saw that’s plagued higher education for most of the past six decades This is the pernicious notion that there are two kinds of knowledge – basic and applied – and that these constitute polar opposites: as you move toward one, you move away from the other This idea was developed for political purposes in the mid-20th century, and was refined to perfection by Vannevar Bush Bush had been President of MIT, and was a science advisor to the President of the United States during WW II He argued that the United States should make substantial investments in scientific research, and to make the case, he had to distinguish between applied research – which was easy to justify – and basic research that had never before been supported by the government He was successful; among other things, his efforts resulted in the creation of the National Science Foundation But like many good political notions, its success created problems far beyond the original borders of the idea In the case of Bush’s dichotomy, the result was a marginalization of applied research and a sanctification of basic research that has resulted in all kinds of mischief since In 1997 Donald Stokes of Princeton published a book called Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation He actually wrote the book as a consequence of 17 consulting for the US National Science Board, which he felt was hopelessly confused by the old basic/applied distinction In this book, Stokes proposed that fundamental knowledge and practical application are actually two dimensions of the same problem, and that the best research was concerned with both In his simple model, he created four quadrants, shown below In the high-fundamental/low-application spot he put Neils Bohr, whose atomic theory at the turn of the 20th century was fundamental but far from application At the low-fundamental/high-application spot he put Thomas Edison, whose inventions changed the world but did not did not create much fundamental knowledge At the apex of fundamental knowledge and practical application, he put Louis Pasteur, whose very practical studies (e.g., into controlling spoilage of beer, wine, and milk) led to fundamental contributions to knowledge (e.g., the creation of microbiology and biological chemistry) I believe this concept is highly relevant to the field of LIS education The field is all about professional education, and certainly must be concerned with practical application At the same time, the field must also be concerned about contributions to fundamental knowledge, or the world will be the poorer in consequence High Fundamental Knowledge Bohr Pasteur Edison Practical Application High Adapted from: Donald Stokes Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1997 With this, I want to turn the tables on the whole issue of research – something I have not yet addressed I have heard some of my colleagues in the LIS field say that the field will not get the academic status it deserves unless it starts garnering more research funding and becomes more like the “high-payoff” fields in the eyes of university administrators I understand this rationale, and I not disagree with it at one level Money talks, we all 18 know But this argument has the logic of things backwards Money is a means to an end, nothing more, and the end of the money is not to gain status To the contrary, status in the academy comes from perceived contribution to knowledge In some fields, this cannot happen without money – experimental physics, for example – and there is no surprise that the combination of big money and contributions to knowledge is a heady combination The former serves the latter – the money serves the contributions to knowledge I suggest that there are many contributions to fundamental knowledge that can be made within the LIS field even without significant increases in research funding, and those must be pursued At the same time, there is a need for greater research funding related to the interests of the LIS field, from IMLS, NSF, NIH, and other agencies This a goal we must all work for together In conclusion, I return to the issue of respect What I have done in this talk is an exercise in my opinion, nothing more I not claim special knowledge or exceptional insight Moreover, the central thesis of this talk is that the field benefits from diversity in thought and action My position is just one data point in a very large space of possibilities That said, I think my position is important because it represents a point of view in the construction of a future for this field This field is not at the mercy of fate Of course, there are things we not control, and they are important We are in the danger zone To fulfill our mandate, we must walk the fine line between faith and fear Our future cannot be chosen with certainty Chance matters We should be guided by the old maxim that the smart person knows how much to leave to chance To adopt one of the most insightful things Marx said, people create their future, but they not create it exactly as they please Were he alive today, he’d certainly see how this applied to him This is a risky business, but it is not just risky I argue that this field falls into that special class called High-Risk/High-Return ventures Sure, we can get whacked It’s dangerous But if we can make it happen, we’ll change the world It’s scary, but so what? Would we have it any other way? 19 ... represents a point of view in the construction of a future for this field This field is not at the mercy of fate Of course, there are things we not control, and they are important We are in the danger... opening opportunities of professional work in the library field to women and people of color Far more significant are the efforts of the heroes and heroines of the library field, educated in our... misbehaving It’s not quite as strong as the leaders of Athens accusing Socrates of corrupting the youth of the city, but there’s something of that flavor in the things I’ve read recently Let me