I work in the private sector in a non-traditional job, but was hired because of my library education. You may think that professionals in a professional firm are educated enough to know how to organize information for easier retrieval. But that’s not true.

What experienced librarians can be in danger of forgetting is what it feels like to be a novice at organizing information. You may get the odd person with a knack for it who doesn’t need an MLIS to do it. But if an organization has problems with the flow of its information, it is probably because they don’t have someone who is good at figuring out its information needs. I would wager that the layperson with a knack for organizing information is more the exception than the rule.

I think that if you concentrate too much on Greenstein’s own background, you miss the point. Courses in web design aren’t going to teach you how to be a master web designer, but that’s OK. Taking an entire degree program is not going to teach you how to be a master librarian. Doctors and lawyers, as the easiest professionals with which to draw a comparison, are not expected to be masters of their subject when they graduate either. There’s other stuff.

As someone in Gen Y, or a Millenial, I don’t see the answer to my employment troubles to be more formal education (as a web designer, let’s say), especially after two degrees. If it were, I could be 40 before I finally get my first real job. Seriously, on-the-job training and apprenticeship type settings would be far more valuable than the classroom setting. So much time can be wasted taking courses in traditional academic time frames because “it takes a year” to learn how to do a task. It doesn’t. It takes X number of years to gain experience/mastery of a skill, not to learn about the skill or concept in the first place. Formal education is not about churning out people with the skills to immediately master the tasks covered in their program of study. That’s the real delusion, and library schools don’t have an exclusive claim on that one. Formal education is about providing basic knowledge on which to build your career. But just because you get basic knowledge, that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to specialize somewhat, or that formal education is entirely useless.

Web design courses in library school, for instance, allow you to apply principles from other typical library functions to the web. By working with the web and understanding how your website users are going to view your website, and how you can evaluate that usage, you can gain an understanding of how to balance the functionality of an OPAC with how your user population is likely to use it. You don’t have to be an expert in web design, and you don’t have to build the software from scratch. But again, that’s OK. You can figure out what you need to do later.

At my library school we were taught that most library work will be done by paraprofessionals, or even untrained staff. In the corporate world, that probably means it will almost all be done by untrained (or differently trained) staff. The challenge of librarianship is to be a good manager and make sure that your collection, broadly defined, gets used. It’s not to do every single little job that you possibly could.

I would have like to have taken some MPA classes. To me, those kind of business classes would have been helpful. I took some general ones but they were too basic.

But I think librarians should be taught to be CRITICAL thinkers about information. That would weed out some of the, well…..people who don’t belong in graduate school frankly!!

However, I would do more than agree with the statement that the degree makes you a generalist. I would say that the degree should always allow you the option to become a generalist. There were a lot of people who are keen to be particular types of librarian. They end up jumping through hoops to take all the right courses, but may never have learnt the right things. I feel like I learned a lot in the courses I took, even though there was no unifying theme to my personal program of study. I can only really point to one or two courses that were disappointing, and that mostly because they were online.

I would consider library school disappointing if I had not learned classification, searching and reference skills.

I worked at least two internships every semester of school, focusing on special libraries. I did learn some very traditional tasks, such as cataloging, but I avoided working in public and academic libraries.

I was offered a job within six weeks of graduation – as a business researcher at a non-profit. There was no library, no books. I used a variety of free and subscription databases to conduct research and analysis. A year later I moved to another non-profit to continue work as a researcher.

I personally believe that I was offered those positions based on the combination of my corporate work experience, the MLIS and my internships. I needed all three. I didn’t need a rebranded LIS program.

And while I agree that the skills learned in library school can be used in other industries, those skills alone are not enough. Just as a second master’s is often required to work as a subject specialist in an academic library, I believe that a relevant bachelor’s is required to work in a non-traditional field. In my specific case, that was business, however, economics or marketing or graphic design could be relevant depending on the position.

I agree with the AL: one semester covering graphic design is not enough. A bachelor’s degree in graphic design, relevant work experience in graphic design and the MLIS may qualify someone though. It all depends on the job posting.

Oh right, Bush isn’t the President.

When I was in library school, there was one student who refused to speak or participate in class. When asked a question by the professor, or while working in a group, she would just shake her head “no” and put her head on the desk!

I also have a co-worker (I work in an academic library) who I seriously think was hired specifically to muck about on Facebook all day. She’s great at it! Never mind that she can’t do the most basic processing work without detailed directions from our supervisor. She is starting library school soon!

For schools that teach graduate-level information and knowledge management courses, library schools are horrible at weeding.