Educating and training library practitioners: a comparative history with trends and recommendations - includes appendix on history of library education

Fluctuations have occurred throughout this era in the number of schools, faculty, and students. Carroll (1975) refers to an unprecedented increase in accredited programs (p. 21); almost twenty years later, Robbins (1993, p. 13), Dalrymple (1997, pp. 31-33), and Daniel (1993, p. 56) paint a very different picture. From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, a significant drop occurred in the number of accredited programs and total faculty, with a significant increase in student enrollment. These changes have put pressure on faculty, especially given the increase in research and publication.

Such is a brief history of what has become master's level education at the graduate level for that first professional degree. We turn now to a historical look at the training for what is now considered the education or training needed for what has become the role of support staff.

THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION FOR LIBRARY SUPPORT STAFF

Even though differentiated duties in library work may be traced back to the Alexandrian library (from Pharoah's librarian, through assistants, to slaves) and the role of the librarian as an educator to John Dury's The Reformed Librarie-keeper of 1650, formal library education history really starts with Dewey's establishment of the School of Library Economy in 1887 (Russell, 1985, p. 293). Dewey asserted in 1876 that "the time has at last come when a librarian may, without assumption, speak of his occupation as a profession" (quoted by Russell, 1985, p. 294). His curriculum and those that followed soon after, however, did not differentiate professional from supportive duties by levels of staff. The School of Library Economy, in fact, described itself as "a short and purely technical course, coming after the general education has been completed" (cited in Metcalf et al., 1943, p. 11). Metcalf et al. describe Dewey's whole approach as an "enlightened apprenticeship" (p. 17).

"Clerical work was seen to be inescapable in any library, and instruction in this was therefore provided..." (Reece, 1924, p. 3). Instruction included "hand-writing, typewriting, and the lettering of hooks..." (p. 4). Reece goes on to suggest that it was the needs of the free public library that shaped the early curricula and that "the library schools were organized and grew up in a period when the development of technique was regarded, and rightly so, as the outstanding task of the profession" (p. 4). By 1924, however, Reece could write, "it seems safe to assume that before many years libraries may be able to abandon the expensive experimentation in technique which has drawn heavily upon their administrative resources in the past; and that, the systems preferable for the various processes having been determined and codified, the libraries will need only to concern themselves with applications... [and] variations" (p. 5).

Thus Reece, writing only a year after the monumentally influential Williamson report, can advocate a "library education scheme" to include training for clerical grades (routine processes) in training classes, training for lower grades (methodology) in college classes, and graduate study (knowledge of subjects and sources) offered only in universities (p. 7).