Bibliographic Control: A Meeting between Educators and Practitioners Co-Sponsored by ALCTS and ALISE
This meeting focused on the requirements for educational preparation of catalogers and other metadata specialists, so that the educational system will continue to produce professional librarians whose skill sets match the needs of the marketplace that they will be entering.
The session was moderated by Arlene G. Taylor, Professor Emerita of the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, and featured the following panelists: Shilpa Rele, Digital Program Librarian – Loyola Marymount University and 2009 MLIS Graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles; Beth Picknally Camden, Patricia and Bernard Goldstein Director of Information Processing – University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. June Abbas, Associate Professor – University of Oklahoma Department of Library and Information Studies.
Shilpa described her LIS studies and the internships that she held while in school. She had no traditional MARC/AARC2 cataloging classes, but did enroll in metadata courses. Shilpa’s internships gave her experience in social tagging and describing digital resources. She appreciated the invited practitioners who spoke her classes, as they gave example of the why of librarianship and shared their practical experience. Shilpa also made a commitment to professional development, and was the ALCTS Emerging Leader in 2010. She concluded that her LIS education was useful, and she made her program work for her goals. The internships were important in giving her hands-on experience with different systems and tools.
Beth spoke as a current practitioner and an employer. She polled colleagues to see what types of positions were open, the skills needed, and the candidate pools that are currently on the market. Many of the positions are part-time, temporary, or grant funded. There’s a demand for digital projects staff, language and/or format specialists, rare book cataloging, and supervisors/managers. The technical skills needed are foreign languages, coding, and the ability to work with large datasets and batch processes. Soft skills in demand are project management, flexibility, training, leadership, and growth potential. Beth and her colleagues have found that the candidate pools are larger, but they aren’t finding many potential employees who fit all of the desired qualifications. There is a perception by employers that MLS programs are not creating a balance between technical services theory and practice.
June gave an overview of research on LIS education in technical services. There is a need for the acquisition of skills like standards, technologies, best practices, and workflows in education. Some of the highlights of the research are that everyone is dissatisfied, including students, practitioners, and employers. There is a consensus that there has to be a balance between technical services theory and practice. There has also been a trend that fewer PhD students are focusing on the organization of information and cataloging, which leads to more adjunct instructors in this area.
During the question and answer session, there was further discussion on the soft or technical skills that employers have to sacrifice when hiring new graduates. Many cataloging/metadata courses examine cataloging records on a one-by-one basis, and there’s a greater demand for employees who can deal with large datasets and understand the patterns in those records. There is also a demand for new hires to be able to think for themselves and have experience with the existing tools of technical services. Technical services departments are getting smaller, and existing staff has less time to train newer staff. In fact, many employers expect new hires to be able to get existing staff up to speed on new processes and skills.
