Forum on international library education

Citation

Gorman, M. (2007), "Forum on international library education", New Library World, Vol. 108 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/nlw.2007.072108aaa.002

Forum on international library education

During my year as President of the American Library Association, I spoke and wrote frequently about my views on the crisis in library education. I also sponsored a forum on library education that was held at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, in January 2006 that proved to be the largest gathering of librarians, library educators and students held in North America in many decades. That forum covered the familiar themes of the growing gulf between library education and library practice; the infiltration of information scientists and others with concerns and values inimical to librarianship into LIS programs; the lack of an established core of courses that cover the essential knowledge of a librarian – leading to wild disparities in what is taught and learned in North American library schools; and the accreditation process for library and information studies programmes, among others.

Librarians are centered on the human record – that vast assemblage of texts, moving and still images, symbolic representations, recorded sound, and other fruits of the human mind. They select, acquire, organise, give access to, and preserve sub-sets of that human record and give advice and instruction on its use. They share core values – stewardship, intellectual freedom, service, etc. – and work cooperatively with other librarians – locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally – through such methods as inter-library lending, cataloguing standards, etc., to ensure coordination of library efforts and strive for total access to the human record. These words apply to the librarians of yesterday and tomorrow as much as to the librarians of today. They also, in my view, apply to librarians of all kinds in all countries. There is a golden thread that connects a school librarian in California to an academic librarian in Mumbai and a public librarian in Nairobi to a government librarian in Sydney. That being so, it follows that there are subjects in which all librarians should be educated and a core of such subjects that apply to all librarians and that should be included in the curricula of all library education programs. I have proposed elsewhere that we should work internationally on identifying that global core and work nationally and within linguistic groups to expand on that core as it applies in a particular country or grouping of countries. As a contribution to these ends, I convened the Forum on International Library Education that was held by ALA in New Orleans at their Annual Conference in June 2006. I was very fortunate to have the assistance of my friend and colleague Ismail Abdullahi in gathering an impressive body of speakers from Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, the United States, and Australasia who delivered the papers to be found in this issue of New Library World and led and participated in the wide-ranging discussions that took place at the Forum. I am deeply grateful to each of the distinguished library educators who participated and to the more than one hundred ALA conference attendees who took part in the Forum.

The road to a revivification of library education in North America is neither short nor easy and work on cooperation between librarians and library educators, both within our countries and between countries, is necessarily arduous and time-consuming but the task is too important for us to be daunted or deflected. We must be good stewards of our profession as well as good stewards of the collections and services of our libraries.

Michael GormanDean of Library Services, California State University, Fresno, and Immediate Past President, American Library Association, New Orleans, June 2006