I found this article to be especially illuminating on the subject. The truth is, Librarianship is a humanities, a Social Study at best and a Pseudoscience at worst. It’s core companion is education, seeing as how a large sector of librarians are employed by educational facilities – its an incestious relationship. The people within this community are increasingly becoming the people who can’t practice the field, so they teach it instead. And if they teach it long enough, they get masters and PhDs in the subjects without ever having the slightest amount of real world experience actualy WORKING in the field they teach. The Academic Path worked well for them, so this is they path they so richly adorn…but…well, it’s ultimately a pyramid scheme…

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-unteachables-a-generation-that-cannot-learn/?singlepage=true

One does not need a degree of any sort to do library work.

When I retire, I’ll perhaps work in a library. At that point I’ll have a pension and I’ll be pulling Social Security, if it’s still around, while enjoying my full medical benefits. At that point I could ask for perhaps $10,000 a year, but they’ll only see me perhaps 4 hours a day, 3 days a week.

Jean Costello, I have yet to understand why some people get huffy about pseudonyms. I have concluded that it is because you have no idea who I am, so you cannot reduce what I say by considering who said it. In short, you cannot practice ” If you can’t kill the message, kill the messenger” style tactics, which is quite popular amongst our citizenry.

Regardless, it would be wise to consider using a Psuedonym. In this manny only the people who need to knwo who you are, know who you are. The rest of the random rock throwers in the world need not know your presonal information, and your name on the world wide web is really no better or worse than your social secutiry number being plastered in a similar manner, particularly if you have a professional portfolio.

The degree is oversold, and the salary sites like to list the median salary as about $50K, so when you’re initially doing the research, wow, it looks purty darned good. But those salary surveys turn out to be very inflated, and must include a good number of highly specialized jobs pulling that median up, because it’s certainly not indicative of the typical public librarian salary.

I agree that this job can be learned and done well without a master’s degree, but I also respect, in large part, the education I received in library school, and I think it has made me much more effective in my job than I would be had I walked in off the street. And I agree that I am not underpaid. My twin is a physician, and she racked up about eight times as much student debt in medical school as I did in library school. Soon, she’ll earn anywhere from 5 to 8 times what I earn. It’s pretty congruent! The same can be said for law school. To compare the three based on the fact that they are “professional” programs is absurd.

What I find most infuriatingly amusing about librarians and education is that people tend to be astonished that we’ve attained education beyond high school, but when they visit the library, patrons expect us to be wellsprings of information– not only about literature, but also about taxes, law, astronomy, IT, geography, history, etc. Anyone can ask us anything any time and stand around impatiently while we jump through hoops trying to find the best answer. And of course, we don’t always do that, but we try as hard as possible. Anyone with any wits about them enters the library field because they want to help, or because they’re fascinated by the work.

Silly SIIS, like getting an MLIS would/could stop idiots from getting library management positions.

“I think it’s silly and wrong to suggest that people are given jobs or promotions just because they have a degree or have more seniority than their competition.”

AL, Jean, and I are saying that in our experience, people ARE given jobs or promotions just because of their degree or seniority–often over and above more talented or harder-working colleagues or applicants. You are (I think) saying that in your experience, this is untrue. I guess we are at a stalemate.

I guess I will just say that I wish I had worked at places like the ones you are referring to! :)

Of course then you get into problems of staff getting let go from their jobs because their institution can’t afford to pay them MLS rates or staff who remain chronically underemployed because the librarians in their institution can’t shift their thinking and acknowledge them as an equal once they have their piece of paper.