David Lonergan

Is Librarianship a Profession

We use the words “profession” and “professional” in a multitude of ways. One colleague is castigated for an unprofessional attitude, while another is called a credit to the profession. When many police departments started requiring a B.A. degree of applicants, it was praised as a move toward professionalization of the force. Everyone knows about “the oldest profession” (but any competent archaeologist will tell you that the first profession was actually that of shaman). However, for most of the modern era “the professions” meant a small group of established, respectable, white-collar ways of earning a living. The professions included medicine, law, architecture, and lower status fields like dentistry, accountancy, and pharmacy. These careers evolved from less specialized endeavors as society grew more complex and the body of relevant knowledge grew larger. It became unacceptable for a pharmacist to treat disease or a barber to double as a bloodletter, except perhaps by accident. The professions as they currently stand have several conditions in common. Where once a law student “read law” under an established attorney and then took the bar exam (if the state had one), now a minimal qualification—in the U.S., at least—is a B.A. followed by several years of study at an accredited law school. Medicine, dentistry, and most other professions similarly require rigorous graduate study. However, the new professional school graduate is not yet fully qualified to practice, despite having typically performed internships or clinical rotations under established practitioners. The final obstacle to entering formal professional status is an examination, administered by state or federal organizations made up largely of professional practitioners. Lawyers must pass the bar examination for the region in which they would practice law; physicians must pass board exams for the specialties they desire to practice, and so on. The right to establish oneself as a professional can be withheld or withdrawn by powerful professional organizations such as the American Bar

Folklore in the Junior College Library.

Many community colleges are located near rural areas where significant folkloric research could be done. Community college librarians may be pleasantly surprised to find many of the standard folkloric resources on their reference shelves. In addition, folklorists may be professors of English, anthropology, history, sociology, art, or music, who carry out research in folklore in addition to their primary areas of investigation. Community colleges should be able to offer courses in folklore without adding faculty or purchasing additional library resources. The article also contains a working bibliography.

The Gift Horse Collection Development Plan.

Academic libraries vary a great deal in their administration, construction, organization, and numerous other factors. Some, limited to a small footprint on a crowded campus, are tall narrow monoliths reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some are housed in elderly halls originally built for administration, while others are sprawling poured-cement boxes that proclaim their librariness to the world. Regardless of outer differences, however, it is the factors within the building that matter most in evaluating a library as a nexus of service. In the present climate of fascination with online this and digital that, it is easy to lose sight of the critical importance of the monographic collection in the evaluation of any library’s ability to serve its clientele. Within realistic budgetary constraints, the collection should be maintained in a fashion as recent, relevant, accessible, and comprehensive as possible. In this regard, as in so many, there is striking variation between libraries, and even between subject fields in a given library. If one continues to acquire books, eventually one will run out of space. Apart from the occasional lost, stolen, or destroyed volume, the collection grows until the library is bursting at the seams. Libraries have dealt with

Popular Culture in the Junior College Library.

ABSTRACT Popular culture is extremely influential in both academe and society at large. However, formal disciplinary study of popular culture lags far behind that influence. Anthropology, film studies, history, musicology, and sociology are only some of the disciplines that frequently include popular culture as a research focus. This article advises on how to more actively include popular culture in an academic librarys collection plan.

Misuse the Power, Miss the Point

Unlike previous entries in this series, the present column will address itself to a problem that plagues virtually all academics, as well as most people in business, K-12 education, and many other walks of life. At one time or another most members of post-millennial western society have suffered through that most hideous of well-intentioned experiences, the botched PowerPoint presentation. (Some of us have presented it as well.) Imagine—you are attending a professional conference, awaiting the keynote speaker. You’re seated in an uncomfortable plastic chair more appropriate to a high-turnover franchise restaurant, sharing a table with three complete strangers and someone you vaguely remember from grad school. The master of ceremonies finishes introducing the speaker, and the talk begins. At first all goes well; the speaker seems knowledgeable, articulate, and interesting.1 But then it happens—the PowerPoint presentation begins. In a room full of well-educated people, many of whom are compulsive readers, the speaker projects on the screen, page by page, every single word of the talk. The audience, some members of which have been known to study the instructions on microwave dinners (when there is no better prose at hand) reads the text of the talk as it is projected, and then hears the same words spoken a varying number of seconds later. It is much like hearing one’s own voice echo during a bad transatlantic telephone call—a very long, very bad, telephone call. To add insult to injury, the speaker often gazes happily at the screen instead of making any lasting attempt at eye contact with the audience.2 What are the real problems with this scenario? Does having the text available visually as well as aurally somehow create a situation in which each version buttresses the other, where the audience members apprehend the presentation in a multi-sensory way? In a word, no. Instead, the written

Taylor-Made Libraries

Back in the 1950s, most Americans had read the book or watched the movie entitled Cheaper by the Dozen (which bears no real relation to the recent Steve Martin movies, except the idea of a comicall...

Wither the MLS

Fluctuations in enrollment and other sources of institutional income have long served as justification for increases in the proportion of part-time employees in academe. It is quite common for the majority of the bread and butter courses at a college, such as mandatory Freshman Comp, to be taught by poorly paid adjuncts with no benefits. (Universities with enough graduate students may call leading such a class a Teaching Assistantship, although who the instructors are “assisting” is far from clear.) Most adjuncts, however, are former graduate students who, for reasons of their own, would prefer to work as any sort of college teacher, to maintain a connection with academe, than try to make a decent living at something else. This situation is a result of rampant over-production of PhDs during the past 30-plus years. To make a long and unhappy story short, the post-Second World War years saw higher education metastasize in America, without adequate long-term planning or the conception that there could be an end to growth. Suddenly there were more colleges, larger campuses, more funds for graduate study, and the like. Because colleges were on the increase, there were good jobs for the average new PhD. Then the economy started to constrict and, not completely coincidentally, the Baby Boomers finished college; decent jobs became scarce. But the typical graduate program did not voluntarily decrease the number of students it admitted, or at least not by much. The upshot of this, with fewer open positions and just as many graduates, was that even lousy jobs became scarce. Suddenly there was a great deal of uncertainty, even insecurity, on campus. The number of students could vary considerably over a short time, making it unwise to fill tenure-track jobs as they opened; no department and no college wanted to find itself with permanent faculty beyond the current need. There had always been a certain amount of part-time instruction, with grad students, faculty spouses, and retirees teaching a few classes for

A Moment in Time.

There is a growing literature on the disappearance of the traditional model of higher education. Fewer courses are taught now than was the case just a few years ago by a full-time, permanent instructor in a single location, to students that the instructor has actually met in person. In fact, each of these aspects is powerfully at risk, and others as well. Another very real threat to the range of education is the growing tendency for departing instructors, or at least their specializations, not to be replaced in their departments. For example, a few years ago my university employed a major vertebrate paleontologist. When he took up a deanship elsewhere, his specialist courses were dropped from the schedule as the position was not filled; in other cases, positions are filled with specialists in other topics. It was in this way that my institution replaced a folklorist with a scholar in another field. While previous course offerings may in effect have been the result of a series of random choices, the outcome is a gradual constriction of the number and diversity of courses offered to our students. It too may be random but the result is one of loss. The past few generations’ ideal liberal arts college, a unitary, nonprofit institution of higher learning, has already changed a great deal. It is no longer clear whether many exemplars of this model can survive the present combination of profit-seeking competition, online provision of courses, multiple-location franchise-like colleges, as well as demographic and economic changes; but the probable answer is that they cannot. Whatever form the typical college will take in another ten or twenty years, it will not resemble greatly what we have at present. Just at the point in time when economic and demographic factors unite to threaten the persistence of traditional models of higher education, other modes of creating and delivering courses offer what appears to be a viable alternative. Little in them is completely new, but taken together they do

Management by Staying Put

The idea of MBWA, or management by walking around, has been attributed over the years to quite a number of sources. (In comic book terms, it has a variety of origin stories.) Among others, the Hewl...

American Popular Music 1950–2000

This article describes and discusses some of the chief resources in the study of post-World War II mainstream popular music. In addition to indicating major areas of research, it can serve as a guide to collection development in the discipline.