Here’s goal number two:

Goal Statement: Through its leadership, ALA ensures the highest quality graduate and continuing education opportunities for librarians and library staff.

Strategic Objectives:

1. Ensure that accreditation standards reflect the needs and core values of the profession.
2. Increase availability of and access to continuing education and continuous learning opportunities for librarians and library staff.
3. Make ALA continuing education programs and publications affordable and accessible in a wide variety of media and formats.
4. Establish standards for educational programs for library support staff.

I wonder if we all believe that we’re getting the amount of continuing education that we need to stay competent in our jobs. Since we all come from such different angles, I wonder if everyone could chime in about their educational opportunities (or lack there of), and how they measure up to ALA’s goal.

I ran across a this post by Jeffrey Zeldman in which he laments:

The bad news is that college and university design curricula are still mostly about everything but information architecture, usability, application design, user-focused design, accessibility, and web standards.

It is a point of pride that I can say that my library school cannot be described by this statement. All of the people who participate in this blog took the class Information Architecture for our introduction to producing web content. Librarians, take a bow.

While his message makes a bow to what he considers “lower-paid librarians,” or those earning less than $25,000 per year, Gorman fails to mention the low, low wages and salaries earned by most professional librarians across the board.

I support the increase and I plan to vote “yes.” But increasingly I recognize that “librarian culture” is often a culture of sacrifice. How can we keep paying more into our professional development and not command higher salaries in return?

Highlights for me at the conference involved seeing what is going on with metasearch technologies. Personally, I have been a big skeptic of metasearching and a true librarian who sees the point in the ‘native interface’ arguments. The folks at the University of Rochester and the California Digital Library have convinced me that federated searching has the potential to become one of the primary library technologies.

Roy Tennant’s keynote address was also an excellent overview of the questions we should be asking ourselves and best practices for development. I was struck by a statement he made that builds upon his maxim, “Librarians like to search. Everyone else likes to find.” He pointed out that our job is to make the computer act more like a good reference librarian rather than force a patron act like a librarian/expert searcher.

I also gave my first professional presentation with my boss on my project work on development of a serials, journals and electronic resource managemennt system. It has been the culmination of a very busy year. We were even blogged (at least twice), with more or less degrees of accuracy. Naturally, I was nervous going into it and will admit to being extremely fortunate for the coattails I had the opportunity to ride in on. The presentation went very well and I would highly recommend this kind of professional development participation…

The job market appears to me to be steady and somewhat stable, though not quite the glorious applicant’s market I felt our library school [PDF] and national association tried to get me to believe in. I feel that the most important piece of information I would tell a current SLIS student sending out applications our someone considering library school is that you must be prepared to move. I think that people will continue to be hired, but the gamble will be location.

The theme of this year’s RBMS preconference was education – both education for librarians and librarians as educators. The real focus, though, was on the former, as many plenary talks and papers and informal chat during the breaks seemed to veer in that direction.

How did library school prepare us? Was it sufficient? Will any number of degrees prepare us for the real work of working as a librarian in a special collections library? Is the LIS curriculum essentially flawed?

As you all know I was probably the number one whip wielder when I was doing my LIS degree. I lamented all of the things that many LIS students lament: the lack of rigor in the program, the dominance of the public and children’s libraries mentality, the ice cream socials. I flogged the ice cream social until it was a vanilla mess.

But at this conference I was feeling ready to defend myself against what I thought would be a loud proclamation that the new crop of special collections librarians are under-educated and, at root, unqualified to take the place of the retiring curators and directors. I even pointed out to a presenter that special collections librarians are in the minority in LIS programs (thus changing the curriculum for, say, two people would be absurd) and that we can learn a lot from talking to public and academic librarians about things like outreach, BI, and reference (where special collections are sorely behind).

To my surprise the proclamation wasn’t finger-pointing at all. The dominant idea in the end seemed to be, “What can we do to better prepare new special collections librarians?” There was a feeling that RBMS and its members were taking on the responsibility themselves to supplement what young librarians learn in LIS programs with mentoring, additional education opportunities (like Rare Book School), and internships.

And as I listened and talked with older special collections librarians, it dawned on me that I’m a professional now, and that I can help with advice and with lending a curious ear to LIS students interested in this field.

Does that mean I’m raring to contact SLIS and put my name in as a resource for students like that? I’m not sure. What do you guys think? Some of you had mentors, I know, but maybe not all. Is it our responsibility to somehow make things better for students who come after us?

Enjoy ALA, or not going to conferences at all!