Greetings All and Bernie in Particular:
My “information” friends—and I DO have
information friends—often respond to the “Is there a chasm
between LIS education and professional practice?” question with a
variant of the “No, it’s all information science. End of discussion”
argument. This is only to be expected since there are certain questions
whose answers cannot be ascertained through quantitative surveys. If you want a
simple answer I would suggest determining whether or not “library” and
“information” practitioners and those “academic practitioners”
who often teach in and administer —without library experience—LIS programs
share the same professional cultures. The short answer is many do not. Culture
and co-cultures, the foundations of both science and practice, can be
learned from e-books but are really learned through living it. I go into
this issue more in both Spanning the Theory-practice Divide in Library
and Information Science (2005) and Renewing Professional
Librarianship(2008).
If you want to go the longer route of “scientifically”
determining the existence of a chasm—or lack of one—here is
what you do. You get millions and millions of dollars to hire a lot of
cultural anthropologists, many “Chicago School” sociologists (if
you can find them), and a lot of folklore scholars. They you have them
read a lot of issues of Library Journal, School Library Journal, VOOYA, American
Libraries, and the equivalent information and knowledge management practitioner
journals. Then you send them to every LIS school, give them every course
syllabi, and let them “sit in” on weeks of F2F and online LIS
classes to determine if the syllabus and classroom activities match the
instruction needed and required professional learning. Then you send them out to
do more such participant –observation and numerous interviews with managers
and new librarians to determine if the LIS educational mix actually matches library-information-knowledge
realities. (BTW, I did a thesis on the professional folklore of
night-school education for a master’s degree at Ohio State University in
the 1990s and can testify that is involved here is a LOT of time on subject. )
You could do all of the above and then find out that the
intellectual lenses used by some of those who actually read the study will not
allow them to accept the reality of the results. For the reasons why this
is so, you might want to revisit Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions or the old legal truism of determining who benefits from
asserting that a particular belief is true. (Jobs anyone?)
In short, a lot of work can be done with conclusions accepted or
rejected on the basis of what benefits the reader the most. It can be
irritating but it is very human.
Best wishes,
Bill
Bill Crowley, Ph.D.
Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Dominican University
7900 West Division Street
River Forest, IL 60305
708.524.6513 v
708.524.6657 f
From: Open Lib/Info Sci
Education Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 3:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 2010 Forum on Library Education
This announcement asks: "Is there a chasm
between LIS education and professional practice?" As Yogi Berra once said, "It's like deja-vu, all over again."
Isn't this question asked just about every year? And don't we wind up with
one group saying "Yes, there is a chasm", and another group saying
"No, there isn't a chasm"? Then there's some heated debate, and
maybe a report. Then people get tired of talking about the question and it
gets put on a back burner until the next round. It sure would be nice to put this question to rest once
and for all by actually answering it. I remember John Unsworth's
suggestion last summer in the iSchool/iCaucus response to the ALA
Library Education Task Force report: To the best of my knowedge, no one (on either
"side") ever took John up on his suggestion. I, for one, am really tired of the "chasm"
debate. It always seems to end with both sides each convincing
themselves that their position is correct. Bernie Sloan
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