“The purpose of this book is to recount the reason ALA enacted the [MLS Project] and to consider its consequences by reviewing relevant data.” (The MLS Project by Keith Boyd Swigger, page 3)
As I discussed in my overview, Swigger is not writing a history of the MLS, but a very focused outcomes assessment (page 4) based on the goals the ALA Board of Education had when it restructured accreditation standards sixty years ago. They suspended accreditation for a couple of years, and when “the [ALA] Board of Education resumed accreditation in 1953, it was guided by new standards, adopted in 1951, that embodied a commitment by the ALA and library schools to recognize the MLS degree as the first professional credential … The new accreditation was the first step in a process of redefining the term ‘librarian'” (page 2).
Librarianship as a profession had been headed this way since Dewy first championed librarians back in the 1880s. The new standards as represented by the Master’s of Library Science degree was to herald a new era of increased professional status, prestige, and income. But, as Swigger states, now that it is sixty years later “…rather than sitting on the verge of revered old age, [the MLS project] finds itself confronted with many of the same concerns that it was intended to dispel…” (page 2). The book is a breakdown of how the situation has remained predominantly unchanged from 1953.
Swigger is careful to make clear that the MLS project is still ongoing. While his book is fairly damning, he views this as simply a step towards reconsidering what the MLS project should be in light of the facts (page 4). A very helpful, to me, aspect of this was the time he took to elaborate exactly what accreditation is and how it is implemented. While I’ve always had a basic awareness that accreditation is important, I’ve never quite grasped the significance of it. Swigger explains the two types of accreditation that exist in the United States university system: institutional accreditation (usually regional) and professional/specialized accreditation (usually by professional organization, such as the ALA). He then explains the ALA accreditation (which is solely for master’s programs, not for whole schools nor for undergraduate or doctoral programs, a surprise to me) and why this was considered such a monumental step forward in 1953.
He also points out that even the library schools themselves do not actually agree on what an MLS is: “Together, the library schools’ accredited master’s degree programs have nearly twenty different titles” (page 6), examples being information science, library and information science, library studies, library and information studies. What does your degree say, and how does match (or not) mine?
This short historical overview is informative, and is just the set up for the nitty-gritty that follows in chapter two (“Goals of the MLS Project”). For now I’ll simply comment that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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