Janet Swan Hill said:
"If you (generic you, not directed at any one person) want to try to improve the educational situation, you might try infiltrating the bodies that have some influence ...like ALISE, like ALA and its Committee on Accreditation and its Education Assembly."
I've actually tried that, to no avail. I was even a member of an ALA presidential committee that was charged with discussing LIS education reforms. I joined ALISE and participated in some heavy-duty online discussions of LIS education reform (actually several discussions over the years). There have been recent ALA and ALISE presidents who saw LIS education as a major policy issue. What happened? Not much. I'm not sure ALISE has the clout it needs to significantly influence LIS education, and while ALA has some clout (accreditation) that hasn't seemed to influence the individual LIS schools all that much. In fact, the top 15 or 20 North American LIS schools (US News and World Report) have formed their own organization (http://www.ischools.org/).
Janet also said "PhDs in related fields don't want to teach in LIS." Actually, faculty members with doctorates in areas other than LIS are well-represented in schools of library and information science. In January 2006, according to ALISE statistics, 40% of full-time LIS faculty members with doctorates held doctorates in fields other than LIS.
And having an LIS PhD doesn't necessarily mean that the degree holder knows much about libraries. There was a recent study of the factors that LIS schools value when selecting doctoral students. The study discovered that "the possession of a master's degree in LIS, and previous employment in an LIS field ranked the lowest among nine possible selection criteria."
Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN
Received on Mon Sep 29 2008 - 12:02:45 EDT