When he was going to school in the 1970s, Harry Hoynes said, “the school librarian always was a woman and the AV (audiovisual) person always was a guy.”
These days, said Hoynes, those two positions frequently are rolled into one, and the jobholders are either men or women.
“When you’re a librarian, you’re at the cutting edge of technology,” said 38-year-old Hoynes, a resident of Chicago’s North Side. “Librarians really are at the forefront of the new technology, and there are so many things you can do with a library science degree now. It’s incredible the variety of jobs you can experience.”
Hoynes is aiming for a job as a school librarian, although it’s now more frequently called school library media specialist. He has one semester left before he earns a master’s degree in library and information science from Dominican University in River Forest.
Technology has transformed the jobs of librarians and the way those librarians are educated, changes documented in a two-year study that looked at library and information science education over the last decade. The study, funded by the Battle Creek, Mich.-based Kellogg Foundation and released in August, uncovered several major trends.
One of the most obvious is school name changes, with many library graduate schools becoming information graduate schools, said Joan Durrance, who presided over the study’s advisory committee. Durrance is a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, Ann Arbor.
Another change is schools now prepare students to work outside of traditional libraries, “in broad-based information environments” such as corporations that need someone to manage their information systems, Durrance said.
“Curricula also have become much more user-centered,” she said. “Twenty years ago the emphasis was on the collections. Now the shift is to incorporate into the curriculum a user focus so you understand why people need the information and what they need it for.”
Elisa Topper, assistant dean of Dominican’s library and information science school, said her school and others “have completely revamped their courses over the years, based on what employers are looking for and the new technology. Students learn how to create Web pages, they learn about databases, how to analyze information (on the Internet), how to find information.”
At some schools, these new skills require more credits. Florida State University in Tallahassee, for example, three years ago increased the number of credit hours required for a master’s degree in library and information science to 42 from 36 credits.
“We felt the students needed to get the core traditions and then also get exposure to the technology,” said FSU associate dean Kathleen Burnett.
The emphasis of technology courses in library science schools, though, tends to be different from the emphasis in a computer school.
“The people in computer schools tend to be more hardware and programming people,” said Ann O’Neill, director of the office for accreditation for the Chicago-based American Library Association. “Our people tend to understand the programming and hardware end but come out of school with a more rounded view of how people look for information, where to go for information, how to select the information a client may need.”
O’Neill said there are 56 accredited institutions in the U.S. and Canada offering master’s degree programs in library and information science, but she expects that number to grow in the next decade. More schools are considering starting programs because of the high demand for librarians. (There are no undergraduate degrees in library science.)
“We’re hearing that for every applicant, there are two jobs, and I suspect it’s even higher than that,” O’Neill said.
The demand for librarians is growing for two key reasons.
“A lot of people entered the field in the ’60s and ’70s and so now there’s a whole generation ready to retire,” said Prudence Dalrymple, dean at Dominican University. The other reason is the variety of job opportunities pulling new graduates out of traditional libraries, and in some cases, paying them more than they can make in a public library.
According to the ALA, the median salary for librarians in academic and public libraries is $42,900. The median starting salary is $31,300. Those figures don’t include specialized libraries or dot.com companies, which are luring graduates by offering much more than these medians, O’Neill said.
FSU’s program has grown to 600 students. To accommodate that many, about half of the students take all of their courses online, Burnett said.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Dominican University have the only graduate library science programs in Illinois. The University of Illinois will have 350 students in its library science school this fall, and about 130 of those will be taking their courses online. Illinois has been offering the distance education program for five years.
“There’s a very heavy demand for the library and information science program and we closed admissions the earliest we’ve ever had to close it in 20 years,” said Leigh Estabrook, dean of the graduate school of library and information science at the University of Illinois. Admissions were closed in March.
Distance education students do have to come to campus for two weeks in the summer, “for boot camp, where they learn how to use the technology,” Estabrook said. They also come to campus once each semester for a weekend with teachers and students.
Dominican’s graduate program, which celebrated its 50th year last year, also is growing, with about 350 students this fall at its River Forest campus. More than half of them are older than 30, said Dalrymple, and many are looking for second careers. William Crowley, an assistant professor at Dominican, said the number of males in the profession also is growing, and is now at about 20 percent.
Suzanne Strom is a second career student. Strom spent 20 years as a picture framer and then five years as a Park District crafts instructor before deciding to enroll part-time in Dominican’s master’s program in 1996. She graduated this summer but may take more classes to specialize in preservation and conservation.
Strom only took a couple of specific technology classes but said technology was integrated throughout the whole curriculum. For example, she said she had to do bibliographic searches online for almost every class, meaning she used different databases to gather information about a book or an article.
“The classes ease you into technology as you move along,” she said. “I learned more about computers than I ever thought I could.”
Hoynes also is pursuing a second career. He’s a studio mechanic who has worked for 14 years in the motion picture studio mechanic’s union in Chicago but now is looking forward to being a school media specialist. He’s a big man who doesn’t fit the lingering stereotype of the prim school librarian.
“The stereotype will always be there a little, but hopefully, it will change somewhat in another generation,” said Hoynes. “The school librarian now is involved in integrating the technology into the curriculum. We’re taking on a bigger role in the schools.”
Although people going into second careers are well represented in library schools, the average age of the students is getting younger, said the ALA’s O’Neill, with more people making library and information science their first choice as a profession. Many of them are attracted by the new diversity of the curriculum and various job opportunities now available to graduates.
“A lot of students are going into nontraditional jobs [for librarians],” said O’Neill, mentioning Web design and corporate knowledge management as examples. “They’re getting hired by corporations who realize they need someone who has the organizational skills you get in a library school and also have the technical skills our students are getting.”
Those students taking jobs in traditional libraries need different training than 20 years ago because what they do on the job has changed. Illinois’ Estabrook said libraries have become computer training centers in many cases. Public librarians, for example, are teaching people how different search engines work, and school librarians are setting up local area networks for their schools.
Making library graduate students experts on these things means giving them the tools to work with in graduate school. And that means big expenditures for universities. Another trend pinpointed in the Kellogg study is the increasing amount of money spent by these schools to keep up with the rapidly changing technology.
“It isn’t just the computers, it’s the servers to support the computers and software and specialized labs to see how good the software is,” Durrance said. “We’re seeing a whole lot more money going into the information infrastructure.”
