This entry is part [part not set] of 9 in the series The MLS Project

Chapters 3 (Librarians’ Standing: Status, Prestige, and Income) and 4 (Recruitment of New Librarians):

“The goal of improved standing involved an enhancement of rewards and the regard in which society holds librarians, as well as improved standing in relation to particular groups, specifically the library workers not regarded as real librarians and the professionals among whome they sought to be regarded as peers.” (p. 23)

Chapter three throws some statistics against an observation that most MLIS professionals are already aware of: that librarians “have not been particularly successful in advancing their status compared to that of the professionals with whom they would like to be peers.” (p. 28) It was about this point in the book that I began to wonder about the whole MLS Project, and thinking that it was misguided from the start. If the goal of better education is to improve status, as compared to improving the profession, it seems doomed to fail (this is revisited in Chapter . Particularly in regards to more academically rigorous professions such as law and medicine and science, creating an MLS degree program for the sake of creating an MLS degree program was counterproductive. It is one thing to demand recognition for the profession, and wholly another to stand around for fifty years patting ourselves on the back.

Chapter four continues throwing statistics at the MLS Projects outcomes assessment in regards to professional recruitment. Like most of the facts Swigger presents, these numbers show that while the MLS Project had a mildly positive effect, it was far from the expected (hoped for) outcome, and could possibly be explained by factors that have nothing to do with the MLS Project.

These two chapters really served up notice of where Swigger takes his argument, and while they are short (as is the whole book) they are well researched and difficult to argue. Swigger makes the important statement here that “recruitment, image, and characteristics of librarians are interrelated topics” in his discussion of the popular image of the librarian and our insecurities about that image. It has become a feedback loop that gets reinforced with every new class of MLIS students, an argument that furthers my conclusion that we are our own worst enemies.

But then, I was attracted to the information studies profession because of my perception of the “librarian image,” which was iconoclastic, intelligent, culturally fringe, creative, and independent. Which gets back, then, to the idea of whether the MLS Project was trying to create a new image for library science as opposed to capitalize on the one it already had. While the old “Marion” stereotype (from the character Marion in the musical The Music Man) is lamented, perhaps we would have been better served by making her our heroic champion. Of course, the difficulty with that was (and is) that Marion was a woman; from the start, the MLS Project was clearly defined by a desire by male library professionals to bring their career out of the “female ghetto” of librarianship.

I’m not suggesting that the MLS Project was a tool of the patriarchy on purpose but rather that the social mores of the era it grew out of, which was the mid-20th century, were very sexist and tied to traditional aspirations of success. Sexism was intrinsic to the values of society at the time, and “woman’s work” was a genuine slur. It might be that the MLS Project should be reframed in gender terms, not in order to place blame on one gender or the other but to critically analyze whether it was doomed from the start.

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