Michael Gorman, current president of the American Library Association comes in for a regular drubbing by bloggers (well, he did say some rude things about blogging in the past...) but he also has charged library schools with falling down on the job; in fact the ALA's Midwinter meeting had a three-hour meeting about it. I'd love to hear comments from anyone who was there.
Anrew Dillon and April Norris take issue with his stance, saying he's "crying wolf." Caveat Lector has a different take - he just thinks library school core courses are badly taught, especially those that introduce principles of cataloging. He and Jessamyn West think more schools should focus on recruiting and training librarians who can code.
Guess I was lucky. I liked most of my library school courses and even remember some of the assignments fondly - and this was several centuries ago, so those teachers must have been doing something right.
Barbara
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I skimmed over the section on gender, because I never have seen that as a serious issue within librarianship. Although I confess to sometimes sharing the concerns of Michael Gorman, I was sufficiently convinced by the authors' evidence that LIS programs have not abandoned the education of librarians or research into libraries. My favorite lines were near the end:
"But these are also times when the major concerns of LIS professionals, such as the organization and management of information, the digital divide, the level of literacy in our society, and freedom of access to public information have become mainstream issues for our culture. This may be a once in a century opportunity to convince those in power that the field has a real contribution to make."
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