Although I am not directly related to teaching in library schools, I do try to follow developments. Certainly, library schools have been closing for some time, or slowly merging into computing science.
Something very interesting I discovered is a basic text "Introduction to Information Retrieval" by Manning, Raghaven, and Schutze, Cambridge University Press, which is available on the web for free(!) at: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-book.html, which I am trying to get through.
It is primarily a computer science book, discussing clustering, Matrix decompositions and so on. There are graphs, charts, and equations of breathtaking incomprehensibility.. It is all very impressive, but I must say that I believe I would be concerned if this text were used extensively in a library school curriculum.
At least from what I have read, I can't find anything about people, about the users. There is also no mention of any traditional library methods. In my opinion, some of the basic differences between computer people and library people, are that computer people focus on the machines, and library people focus on human beings. (Yes, this is a gross exaggeration, but it also reflects organizational responsibilities) At the same time, I have problems that a book entitled "Introduction to Information Retrieval" essentially ignores how people retrieved information for the vast majority of human history, and they still do today. Therefore, someone who manages to wade through this dense text may believe that they have a good overall understanding of information retrieval, and they will, but only in one narrow sense of the term. But they may not realize, and at times not even admit, that they have this limitation.
The reason I am going on about this is that I am concerned that the future of library education may go in this same general direction, which would distress me. Librarianship should be about people, and their needs. It should include some aspects of matrix decompositions perhaps, but the focus should be about what people's informational needs are. These needs are *not* those I was taught in library school, and *not* the user needs in FRBR. I don't know if they were ever the real needs of users, but if they were at one time, they are not the needs any more. We have to discover what these needs are, so the experience of reference librarians becomes very important. Plus, we should increase our understanding of how people interoperate with the tools that we, and others, make, so that we can improve what we do.
Library students can provide fresh ideas for us. This should be nurtured.
Of course, librarians need to know how to shift books, too.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Fri Oct 03 2008 - 01:38:01 EDT