Caveat Lector

Just as well I enjoy proto-librarians, because I ran into yet another one at this week’s chorus rehearsal. Nice woman, as overeducated as I am, looking at going into academic librarianship.

So we got to comparing our programs (seeing as how I’m a recent grad and all), and it turns out that several of her courses have been abysmally taught. This is no great surprise to me; so were a number of mine. And another no-brainer: the worst-taught courses are the so-called “core” courses.

I really hate to say it, but this appears to be a library-school universal. I’ve never heard anyone express unequivocal satisfaction with the core courses in their librarian education. And before anyone asks, yes, we understand that pedagogical quality is going to vary, and that we’re going to like some subjects more than others. I’m not talking about ordinary vagaries of teaching here; I’m talking about library schools falling down on the job. Classes that suck, rather than merely not rocking.

Which class gets the most complaints? Well, in my school it was “Organization of Information,” and my interlocutor at rehearsal agreed about her school’s variant. The person who taught me this course was pleasant—and completely clueless. Why, after all, should she have a solid understanding of the subject matter? She does statistical research into software usability and design. Frankly, except for the MARC bits, I could almost have taught that course better at the time I was taking it.

Some schools (such as my interlocutor’s, apparently) have revamped this course to toss a bunch of IT concepts in, and that is helping not at all, given the average tech-savvy of your average LIS faculty member… so much is it not helping, in fact, that my interlocutor said of her course, “It makes me really scared of taking a course in databases or web design.”

Insert horrified shriek here. I hope I changed her mind, but I’m not sanguine.

No bloody wonder librarians can’t, don’t, and won’t code. The precise course that ought to give them confidence in handling digitized information (be it in MARC, XML, an RDBMS, some combination of the above, or something else entirely) is driving them away from it in droves because of heinously poor teaching.

Oh, and before M-ch–l G-rm-n or his pet bullyboys get all up in my face, let me just point out that this same course is typically the prerequisite for cataloguing, so if it’s taught poorly, the librarian world ends up with fewer cataloguers. (And judging from the job postings I have been monitoring for New Librarian, that doesn’t seem to be so far off from the truth.)

In library schools’ defense, these Info Org courses are viciously hard to teach. It’s a lot of material, some of which is banal memorization (yes, I can recite the main Dewey and LCC divisions from memory, how about you?), and much of which exercises modes of thinking that are new for most non-geeks. Scary bad combination.

Moreover, if the teacher doesn’t understand the technologies to be taught (hush; MARC is a technology too, folks) well enough to get across why they exist, what problems they solve, how they think about their problem domain, and how we need to think about and use them in order to get our work done—well, how can we expect proto-librarians to?

And library schools are also fighting against the research-faculty grain to get coverage for these courses at all. Or they’re turning to guest lecturers who are practitioners, which sounds like a fine idea but has the bad habit of crashing headlong into a busy practitioner’s Real Job. I heard a hair-raising story about this at rehearsal: a course with no assignments, no papers, no projects, no tests, no evaluation whatsoever because the guest lecturer was too busy with the Real Job to grade anything.

There’s no easy answer. Honestly, though, my reaction now is the same as it was when I was taking the courses: get the core stuff taught and taught well or stop pretending to be a library OR info-sci school. All of this poseur nonsense helps nobody.

This is not to say that I disagree with Andrew Dillon and April Norris’s conclusion that the G-rm-nesque “library education crisis” is a trumped-up pile of baleful bile, because Dillon and Norris are quite right about that. By and large, library schools are at least interested in teaching the right stuff.

They’re just not interested enough to get it taught right, that’s all; and buried at the end of their article, Dillon and Norris say in a pianissimo whisper that they agree with that assessment.

Speaking of Andrew Dillon (who has a new blog, by-the-bye), I’ve been reading and enjoying the second edition of Designing Usable Electronic Text and wondering why I’d never seen the book before.

The conclusion I came to is that the book makes a lot of people uncomfortable. (So it’s only natural that I’m loving it, eh?) It makes researchers uncomfortable because it isn’t afraid to point out that the emperor of digital text usability research is naked as a jaybird. It makes practicing text artisans uncomfortable because hell’s bells, we aren’t even paying attention to the little research that there is. It makes librarians uncomfortable because… well, librarians are always uncomfortable.

And it makes M-ch–l G-rm-n uncomfortable because of its spirited, drily funny defense of human-computer interaction as a worthy—indeed, necessary—topic of inquiry. G-rm-n, you see, would prefer not to admit that humans interact with computers at all… never mind actually programming the beasts.

Which brings me neatly back to my post title. Librarians can’t code because too many librarians and library schools have their noses so far up in the air about computers that they are neither recruiting coders (which is purest, sheerest madness—why are we not using the exodus of women from comp sci to our advantage?) nor creating them.