“In [MLS advocates’] approach to professionalism, they have confused two issues: whether librarianship is a profession, which is a factual question, and whether it ought to be a profession, which is a question of values.” (p.107)
This is the chapter I made the most notes about, because I’m something of a theory whore. So bear with me. Or skip it, honestly I won’t mind. However it does make for some interesting food for thought.
The core problem with the MLS, as described here, is that the issue of professionalism was reduced to a “trait model”, that is, “the method for an occupation to become accepted as a profession is to acquire the traits of the recognized professions.” (p.116)
Swigger does a lot to back up this argument. His analysis of the faults of the trait model go on for a few pages, but the most informative aspect of his argument is that applying an ideal type as a recipe (“lawyers have degrees; lawyers are professionals; therefore professionals have degrees”) is a recipe for disaster. He also discusses the symbiotic relationship of librarians to libraries (can you have librarians without libraries? It is a valid question given the digital revolution, but it is also valid in regards to defining what a librarian’s job is at a more theoretical level). As Swigger points out, “the issues of libraries’ roles in the future are ultimately ideological issues, not technological ones” (p.113), despite appearances.
This in turn gives rise to the next argument that Swigger makes, which is that the problem with “using the trait model as a checklist is that the social need addressed by an occupation or profession may change substantially.” (p.115) No kidding.
There is a very powerful paragraph on page 117 that starts, “The MLS Project experienced difficulties in developing a library science…” and is addressing the utter lack of a sophisticated body of knowledge and theory within the field. There is theory, I will grant you, but sophisticated? Not so much, in my experience. I found much more complex and deep theory of information studies in the humanities courses I took (in connection with the History of Text Technology certificate offered via the English Department). Swigger poses the question of why we are not asking “What is beautiful librarianship?” which is something I’m not sure has been seriously addressed since Ranganathan.
Page 117 also has an important comparison of librarianship to law, profession to profession, and why it is pretty much a given that the two will never be seen equally in terms of prestige and status. Swigger does not mention, as I have brought up previously, the fact that librarianship has been viewed historically as a feminized profession, whereas law has always been the provenance of the social elite (middle to upper class white men, for the most part). I still feel this is a critical issue to address openly if we are going to attempt to identify Information Studies as a professional profession; are we simply trying to ape the masculinized ideal of what a professional is or are we willing to try to retrofit what a valid “profession” is to librarianship as it stands? That is, instead of running from the “Marion Librarian” stereotype as fast and hard as possible (as the MLS Project was designed to do) are we going to fight to hold up our feminized history as its own valid model of professionalism? (I would like to point out that Marion the Librarian was the hero of the musical, smarter than pretty much everyone around her, better read, better educated, and held herself to a very high level of professionalism in her career…the fact that she was a soprano was incidental).
The rest of the chapter delves into two other “models of professions”: “power” and “jurisdiction”, which are both important but too complex for me to recap here in a meaningful way. However one thing that got me thinking is that for the public to recognize librarianship as a profession, we as professionals would have to be viewed as solving an important problem. Most people today, especially in the Google era, see no problems with information searching or wrangling because most of those problems are “behind the scenes,” so to speak. If anything, the digital age is ushering a new era of invisibility for information professionals.
I’ll finish this part of the series with two quotes that encapsulate the issue as Swigger sees it, and as I feel it truly stands:
- “The concept of professionalism in the MLS project was flawed because it focused on the characteristics and rewards of librarians rather than on the needs of clients or the kinds of expertise required to serve them.” (p. 126)
- “The question ‘Is librarianship a profession?’ is unproductive. A more important question is ‘What are the functions of libraries as social instruments?’…until librarians can answer the question of function without rhetorical flourishes, more complex questions and answers will perplex them.” (p.129)
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