Sadly, being the blog thief that I am, I am once again stealing an idea from the Krafty Librarian. After reading her post today about the current/impending shortage of librarians I feel the need to take a moment and address a question she asks at the end of her post:

So who is right?! Is there a shortage of library jobs? Do we need to educate, train, and hire a lot more librarians to replace those retiring? Or are we promoting a myth and the reality is that we are over populated with librarians?

I'm not sure if it is as simple as myth vs. reality. As harsh as this may sound I don't think there is a shortage of librarians, but there is a shortage of competent librarians. And no, I'm not being mean. The LJ article Krafty mentioned touched on this, so this is just more than my opinion.

I think the problem is that the majority of students in MLS programs now think that having the degree is enough since they are being told that there is a shortage. So they don't bother to acquire any skills outside of the classroom. They weren't predicting a librarian shortage when I was getting my degree, but I could see the laissez-faire attitude in many of my classmates when it came to seeking skills outside the classroom. I hate to be the bearer of bad news to these people, but a classroom education just won't cut it.

I obviously can't speak about the experiences of other librarians at their first professional position, but for me what I learned in the classroom did not prepare me at all for being a reference librarian in a public library. I loved my reference instructor as a person, but the man never talked about reference books in class. He just gave us a list of questions to answer and expected us to figure out what books to use. The textbook we were assigned helped somewhat, but it would have been much more helpful if he had actually pointed us to possible sources. Usually when faced with a questions assignment I would wander the reference stacks hoping that if I browsed enough I would find the right book. In some ways I'm amazed that I managed to muddle through the class.

Another thing that was kind of scary about the reference class I took, was that the instructor was super high on the Internet but didn't spend anytime in class covering it. Anytime a question came up in class about locating information he would say, "I'm sure you can find that on the Internet. You can find almost everything there." Did he ever show us (or even talk about) websites he liked to use? No. Did he ever talk about the best way to search the Internet? No. Did he even address evaluating Internet resources? No. I think this is why I'm such a hard ass with my students. They may hate me at times, but at least my conscience is clear because I know that when they leave my classroom they will be better prepared for reference work than I was.

Which leads me back to the idea of myth vs. reality. Maybe the myth is that graduate schools aren't producing enough qualified candidates because they don't have enough of an enrollment, while the reality is that some schools are churning out unprepared librarians like they are puppy mills.

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