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Covering the Bases

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By Todd Gilman

Surely the last thing a Ph.D. in the humanities or social sciences could wish for, having survived years of failure on the tenure-track job market, would be to relive the horror of unemployment (or underemployment) after committing the time and money necessary to qualify as an academic librarian.

As one who landed on his feet, I am relieved to be able to endorse some of the advice I was fortunate enough to receive before I began my journey, and pleased to pass on a few other tips I picked up along the way.

Rule No. 1: You Must Take a Job in a Library

Ideally you should begin working in a library before enrolling in a master's program in library and information science. That way you'll have some idea which aspects of librarianship most interest you.

Knowing what sort of library work most interests you will help you make the all-important decision of whether to focus on public services (reference, instruction, collection development, interlibrary loan, and circulation) or technical services (cataloging, acquisitions, and systems). That decision determines how you will focus the elective portion of your master's program.

A master's in library science is a practically oriented degree that loses much of its perceived value in employers' eyes if it's pursued in a vacuum. I would even recommend that you work full time in a library and go to school part time over two years. If you emerge from your program with no work experience in a library, you will find yourself at a serious disadvantage on the job market.

You might supplement that work with an internship or fellowship like those offered by the Library of Congress. For a comprehensive listing, consult the Association of Research Libraries' database of internship programs.

Alternatively, the Council on Library and Information Resources offers a fellowship program that commands attention at once because it caters specifically to recent Ph.D.'s seeking alternative careers. The program's stated aim is to "establish a new kind of scholarly information professional," although its role in professional credentialing remains to be seen because it is so new.

Rule No. 2: You Don't Have to Attend a Top-Ranked Program

Although some debate persists on this issue, I believe that as long as you have a Ph.D. -- or a law degree or even a master's degree -- it matters little where you choose to pursue your master's of library science.

So long as your program is accredited by the American Library Association, you will be marketable. Go ahead and pick the least expensive one, the one that offers you the most financial aid, the one closest to home, the one that will give you the most credit for other graduate-level courses you've taken, or some combination of the above.

And there's no shame in completing the degree online if you want to. In fact, some of the most respected programs boast a significant online component. If you harbor lingering doubts about online education and fear that prospective employers might, too, keep in mind that transcripts and diplomas do not indicate that courses have been completed online; moreover, virtually all major libraries have hired graduates of online or partially online library-school programs.

Maybe you want to attend a top-ranked program in the field. If so, consult The Gourman Report (The Princeton Review, 1997) or the 1999 ranking of library schools (the most recent available) by U.S. News & World Report.

If you want to make a big switch from your current background or wildly expand your horizons (and you can muster the financial support to do so), you might look into dual-degree programs that combine library science and, for example, history, anthropology, music, or Latin-American studies. For a guide to available financial aid for students pursuing the master's, see the American Library Association's Web page on the subject.

Rule No. 3: Cover Your Bases

Make sure your master's course work demonstrates that you understand what potential employers will expect of an academic librarian.

Most library-school programs lay out the curriculum for you. Brace yourself for lots of requirements. A typical curriculum will include required courses in basic technological literacy; reference work; library management; cataloging (the courses will have cryptic titles like "Information Organization and Access" or "Organization of Information in Libraries"); and the history or foundations of librarianship (a course covering how librarianship emerged and continues to evolve as a profession, as well as information policy, access, ownership, and copyright issues). Some programs will also require a course on collection development or collection management.

Be sure to take a class in each of those subjects even if your program does not require them.

For your elective choices, you should take, if possible, courses on academic libraries, bibliography, telecommunications and computer networks, and Web development (HTML and other markup languages).

Then if you plan to specialize in public services, you should consider a course in instructional technologies or advanced reference.

Should you plan to specialize in technical services, take a course in advanced cataloging and classification, or indexing and abstracting, or both. If you are a technology whiz, you might also benefit from courses in digital libraries, database design, and information architecture.

Interested in archives? Pick a program that offers a specialization in archives and records management. Relatively few library schools offer comprehensive training for would-be rare-book and special-collections librarians (or preservation specialists, for that matter), so if those are your passion be sure to choose your program accordingly.

Keep in mind that you can also supplement any program with courses at the University of Virginia's excellent Rare Book School.

To cover your bases (i.e., in case you land at a small library where you might need wide-ranging reference and research skills), consider taking a course in some area of academic librarianship that will be a stretch for you: the literature of science and technology, or of government publications.

By the way, the Association of College and Research Libraries maintains a useful Web page on recruitment to the profession, which you should bookmark to keep abreast of developments in training-related matters.

A few final caveats: If you want to be a law librarian, you need a law degree plus a course in legal bibliography as part of your master's of library science. If you want to work in a special library such as a music library, a museum library, a science or medical library, or an art library, you should have a master's or at least a bachelor's degree in one of the subjects in which the library specializes and, if possible, take the corresponding library-school courses in that specialty.

Focus on finishing both your course work and your preprofessional apprenticeship with as little hand-wringing as possible. Just get through it and move on.