Recruiting, Training and Retention of Science and Technology Librarians

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "Recruiting, Training and Retention of Science and Technology Librarians", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 9, pp. 738-740. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810911888

Important professional issues insist on coming out into the open. Several of these emerge here: do enough people go into library and information work, and of them do enough go into science and technology work? Are most library (school) students and recruits arts and humanities‐based rather than science and technology‐based, and so not interested in (and equipped for) work as a science librarian? Now that the cadre of practitioners in this/these field(s) is approaching retirement (in this book authors refer to the US baby‐boomers), is a replacement deficit emerging that might not be filled? And what kind of training/education can and should be offered to people coming on‐stream and how should current and future practice be managed?

These issues, writ large, apply probably to every and any aspect of library and information and knowledge work. Succession planning and employee retention are important aspects of the human resource and organizational development process for all organizations, libraries among them. Educating and training a forward‐looking and effective work‐force, the people we have and people we want and need, at pre‐practitioner and at continuing education levels, is central to the strategy. Some have been saying this for years, banging on like Jeremiahs, seeming to promote vested interests, treading through clichés (about the virtues of training and the need for performance appraisal) and stereotypes (librarians do not like science) and – according to this new book – the future has arrived.

This is a timely book, even though it is not a very even or convincing one of its kind. Undersold in the past, with a replacement gap (new librarians for old, finding credible and effective ways of keeping current practitioners in post) looming, recruitment and training and retention (and all of them really are linked – it is not mere rhetoric) need to come to centre stage and get far more attention. In a series of papers contributed by various US (and other) library practitioners, this set of issues gets fair attention. Readers may be interested to know that as well as appearing as this monograph (Haworth publish many others on “sci‐tech” library work – try their web catalogue) these papers have been co‐published simultaneously as Science & Technology Libraries, Vol. 27 Nos. 1‐2 in 2006. Kreitz and DeVries (director of technical information services at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and a retired university librarian, respectively) have gathered together enough papers here to make the point. It is US‐centric with one side‐glance at Africa.

It has been an ambivalent experience reviewing this book, partly because the information and opinion in the articles are of mixed value, partly because (however good it might have been) so many of the issues have an undeservedly tired feel to them, and partly because, ultimately, as in the UK, some pretty questionable and hackneyed solutions are offered. Teasing these things out, the articles offer some useful opinion on recruitment and training and retention (a case study about the University of Illinois, a description of the science link programme, some survey evidence from students on their choice of training option, some advice about providing enough continuing education to retain valuable staff and the role of online training materials for achieving this). What emerges is no surprise – too few recruits with science backgrounds, evidence that librarians tend not to go into science and technology (or indeed come from it), all too few recruits hear much about the incentives and rewards of working in science and technology library and information work, and many science/technology‐trained graduates see librarianship as a poor career choice.

The diagnosis is realistic as far as it goes, not just for the USA but for everywhere else. The one African piece corroborates this view (it is just on university libraries). The book is right, too, to suggest that science and technology library and information work seem to be poorly promoted, or at least that many recruits going into this work tend not to know about it or want to do it or both. Evidence comes from a literature search (one piece), a survey (another), a case study and some anecdotal personal stuff. The link between recruitment and training, on the one hand, and employee retention, on the other, is important, and leads to at least one article that has sensible proposals about strengthening that link – mentoring, support for research, closer links between libraries and professional bodies, more systematic and customized staff retention programmes. Little hard‐evidence is provided here, a shortcoming in the book just where it cries out for proof.

This takes us finally to the response: hand‐wringing and whingeing aside (this book does not offend here but many stakeholders do little else), what are the solutions? More effective promotion and publicity for science and technology library and information work) apart from science link, little else here, but surely there is more?); more targeting of science and technology graduates, surely, though again little sense (here or anywhere else) that joined‐up thinking has been given to this; of course the “library schools” are to blame for a lot of it, but nothing here examining curricular design or reform or marketing; and that old pair of stalwarts – more work by professional bodies (e.g. on competencies) and more standards monitoring and evaluation.

The credibility gap here – taking the form of believing that, simply by articulating lists of competencies and/or arguing for more self‐evaluation – the world is going to change and fellow‐professionals (like managers and line‐managers and scientists in organizations for which such librarians are likely to work) will fall over themselves to say how useful and competent the librarians are – is as large, and as worrying, as the replacement gap to which the contributors of this book refer. Who will read this book? Rather like a declining church, only people already in the pews. If science and technology strategy, the knowledge and creative economy and all its implications for GDP and global competitiveness, organizational development and succession planning and effective training provision for the future are to be a coherent strategy, this yearning earnest and introverted approach will simply not cut the mustard. Nice and cosy if read by concerned insiders, such books make a point that deserves a much higher profile.