No question is more likely to raise a donnybrook among librarians than the following: Should all librarians have a master of library and information science (MLIS or MLS) degree? Ask a question, step back and watch the fireworks.
A recent survey I conducted of every R-1 and R-2 university library in the United States (with responses from chief librarians at 167 universities) identified a great deal of dissatisfaction with the traditional management of the field as the only or best credential for professors. A significant and particularly strong minority of managers (31 percent) still insist that the MLS serve as a mandatory, basic title for employees, asserting that those without the specified qualifications should never have the title “librarian.” But a powerful majority is now willing to consider other guarantees.
I am with that growing majority. Given the progress of the past few decades, those who argue that we should treat such qualifications as optional rather than mandatory have a strong case to make. With this in mind, I present six ideas in favor of recognizing other credentials for those the institution hires as librarians.
First, national survey responses are replete with reports of an inability to find among library school graduates the necessary skills to perform library functions. Leaders provide a frank and often scathing assessment of library school graduates’ skills (and often don’t bring them to the job market). The skills cited as especially lacking include teaching experience, STEM technology, social science technology, art, area studies, organizational development, computer science, all kinds of disciplinary fields, “area studies” of all kinds, scholarly communication, data visualization, research data services, data management, information technology and programming work, geographic information systems, digital scholarship, data science, data data methods “fundraising, communication, advertising and marketing, and “information policy.”
Simply put, administrators at many leading libraries do not find enough librarians among library school graduates.
Second, authorizing the MLS imposes less disciplinary authority on the school that other fields do not want to impose, and such authority restricts our recruitment in ways that other fields do not. Many fields with a strong emphasis on authenticity seek candidates with degrees in far-reaching fields: women’s studies, bioinformatics, environmental studies, ethnographic studies, indigenous studies, information sciences, media studies and neuroscience, to name a few. All of these fields employ faculty with degrees from all disciplinary fields. Or consider a major theology department, which could use graduate expertise in hermeneutics, classics, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, religion, philosophy, theology, homiletics and even languages, music, education and law.
The point is that some fields accept multiple types of certifications for multiple types of work and expertise. Of course they want professional credentials, but they don’t explain those details any less than librarians argue for a mandatory MLS. It’s not clear why a librarian should deny such a separation of yours. In fact, it is ironic that librarianship—arguably a multidisciplinary field—can impose disciplinary mandates that other fields shy away from.
Third, national survey results indicate that librarians who have hired and thus worked with non-MLS librarians are significantly more likely than non-MLS librarians to believe that non-MLS librarians make good librarians. They know them. They know their job. And they speak well of that work. Those, on the other hand, who say that professors without an MLS are underemployed are less likely to hire and thus work with such people. In short, those who tend to expand candidate pools more than MLS managers tend, on average, to talk about experience working with those people; those most suspicious of non-MLS librarians speak from little experience with those candidates.
To put this another way: Those who claim that non-MLS librarians can acquire the skills needed on the job, wrongly, are those who have seen non-MLS librarians on the job. Those who argue that professors with Ph.D degrees in other fields can be interviewed for work have, for the most part, seen attempts to communicate with people.
Fourth, those who recruited candidates outside the MLS are likely to do so again. Only six of the 80 survey respondents who employed librarians outside the MLS in the past 10 years said they did not plan to do so in the next 10 years. do (plan to hire one in the next 10 years.) In fact, 108 of the 167 total respondents plan to hire a librarian outside the MLS in the next 10 years.
Fifth, processes are evolving to obtain other guarantees. The question is from “Why would we hire professors without MLS?” that “Why we not hiring librarians outside the MLS?” Another recent study found that librarians hired after 2009 “were more likely to accept Ph.D. owners without MLS qualifications compared to older generations of librarians.” The federal Office of Personnel Management does not require an MLS for its Librarian Series 1410 program, a division that applies to librarian positions in the Library of Congress. In 1986 those without an MLS represented only 7 percent of new professors; by 2015 this figure had grown to 24 percent.
Marybeth F. and Paul W. Grimes report that “Job openings requiring an MLS increased dramatically in the early 1990s”; they have experienced a “significant decline” since 2000 in the number of MLS mandatory positions. As they write, “In 2000, only 75 percent of all jobs were advertised [in College & Research Libraries News] on MLS listings as a requirement for applicants, and by 2005 the number had dropped significantly to about 58 percent.
Elizabeth A. Waraksa reported on early complaints and resistance to the 2004 launch of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, designed to provide entry into the academic literature for Ph.D. non-MLS owners, while noting that, by 2006, the debate had “largely disappeared from the literature”; Daphnée Rentfrow also noted in 2007 that the “initial negative response” to the CLIR program was “turning into a very positive reception.”
A national survey of research libraries makes it clear how widespread alternative certification grants are today: 65 percent of R-1 and R-2 university libraries now have policies that allow them to hire librarians without an MLS or international equivalent. Only 17 percent of university librarians do not support hiring, at least in some cases, librarians with Ph.D. but not MLS That figure drops to 12 percent for R-1 institutions and 9 percent for Association of American Universities and/or Association of Research Libraries member institutions. Only 15 percent believe that professors without an MLS are less effective than those with an MLS. That figure drops to 8 percent at R-1 institutions and 5 percent at AAU/ARL institutions.
In addition, 61 percent of respondents report that it is prohibitively difficult to hire all the librarians they need if they limit the library pool to those with MLS Only 20 percent disagree, and only 5 percent believe that faculty and students treat librarians with MLS better than those without. Only 16 percent believe professors without an MLS are less likely to get tenure, and only 14 percent believe they are less likely to be promoted.
Those opposed to mandatory MLS ultimately faced the daunting task of explaining to the 65 percent of universities that plan to hire non-MLS librarians and the 48 percent of universities that have already done so—and are unhappy with the performance of those librarians—why they shouldn’t. And it takes an even worse job of telling good professors that they shouldn’t be professors.
Sixth, those seeking election only among MLS executives must contend with the sad uniformity in our field: According to the latest statistics, 87 percent of MLS executives identify as white and 81 percent as women. Such statistics are not very consistent with the statistics of Ph.D. owners of other fields. Similarly, racial and gender diversity among recent MLS recipients poorly tracks diversity among recent Ph.D. they don’t accept. These discouraging statistics influence the thinking of libraries that expand the scope of acceptable information. And, one might think, they explain why, when reminded of librarian demographics, only 14 percent of respondents to a national survey indicated that our profession should not include people with advanced degrees other than MLS.
Those who fight for a mandatory MLS, and at the same time claim to be committed to decentralizing our work, bear the burden of proposing viable alternatives. Few appeared in the survey responses from mandatory MLS supporters. And given our work’s failure to move the diversity needle significantly, it’s clear that what alternatives exist aren’t working—at least not at scale. But even if they were, or couldn’t, or would (our job is not to leave promising options untested), why wouldn’t we add to the mix of options by looking for candidates beyond the 87 percent white pool?
The good news: The same research that identified such dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction with traditional certification processes identified a number of new methods and advice for rethinking and reforming such practices, accompanied by a series of success stories. For those eager to expand the candidate pool for our most demanding profession—who wish to attract the best and the brightest, regardless of degrees—these stories are well worth reading. Change is coming. And the reports from the changers couldn’t be more encouraging.
