What is the value of a graduate degree? It is a calculation: time plus tuition minus the chance of getting the right job after graduation. When the costs far outweigh the return, a new question might occur to graduates: Can I have my money back? Most prospective graduate students run the math before applying to a program, but it is next to…

On August 30, 2019, the Vatican Library hosted a satellite IFLA conference on topics related to education for professionals, exactly 90 years after the first international conference was held in Rome, when the IFLA was officially named and its first statute was established. This paper was presented at the satellite conference to briefly summarize…

This article provides background on community archiving as it relates to a group of faculty members currently working together to address the challenge of reimagining archival education to center non-dominant archival traditions and the restructuring of internship programs to provide financial compensation, by asking how MLIS programs might…

Resulting from the collaboration between five practicing professionals and an LIS faculty member, this article illuminates the experiences of librarians and archivists who engage with LIS students on a continuous basis as guest speakers in LIS classrooms. The phenomenological approach helps to elicit first-hand accounts that encapsulate…

The rising demand for digital information resources and services in the LAM sector has sparked many innovations by educators in recent years, as we seek to prepare students for careers in an environment that has continued to witness rapid and hard-to-predict changes. Granting agencies such as IMLS have played an important role in driving…

In the United States, the occupation of law librarianship has existed longer than the American Library Association, and law librarians have their own professional organization that is now more than 100 years old. Throughout this history, however, the related issues of degree requirements and education standards for law librarians have been…

This article outlines the Knowledge Lens--a way of seeing more clearly the opportunities for knowledge creation within organizations and society. It is proposed as a model for schools of Library and Information Science (LIS) to follow when considering curriculum changes. Instead of producing two sets of graduates--those in information and those in…

As makerspaces and hackerspaces pop up in libraries and museums, one little lab sits in the middle of an Information School, but it is not a maker-space, a gallery, or a museum. The MuseLab, at the Kent State School of Information, is something else, something new--or perhaps something familiar, but situated in a different context, making it less…

In this article, the author proposes to present a superficial view of what is being taught in the 32 American Library Association accredited graduate library schools. She briefly discusses and answers the following three questions: (1) Who is teaching reference?; (2) What is being taught?; and (3) How is it being taught? [For the commentary on…

Cheney's paper was the first major article on the subject of teaching reference in American library schools. In the article, she addressed three questions: (1) Who is teaching reference?; (2) What is being taught?; and (3) How is it being taught? In this article, Linda Smith discusses how the teaching of reference has changed in the more than 50…

Amid growing isolationism after World War I, the American Library Association transferred its wartime programs to train librarians in Europe and promote the American model of public libraries. Working in collaboration with American philanthropists and members of the French library community, ALA established a permanent library school in Paris that…

Few academic librarians ten or fifteen years ago would have believed that those days of flat-lined budgets and miniscule raises could ever seem a golden (or at least silver) age by comparison. It turns out that there is something even worse than uncertainty, however--the absolute certainty of budgetary constriction and unwise decisions.…

The ability to navigate the vast ocean of available information and perform reference services in digital environments is an essential component of the job for most of today's reference librarians, especially those working in academic libraries. Reference librarians face a challenge: they must be highly skilled at searching for, locating, and…

When school librarians are hired, most of them will find positions as the only librarian in the school. Their training, their ideals, and what was once a clear vision of the profession can become murky when removed from their classrooms, their professors, and their peers. New school librarians can look for help in the district policies and…

The pedagogy of library and information science appears to be experiencing somewhat of an identity crisis. Many LIS graduate programs teach librarianship within both a theoretical, academic context, as well as a practical, work-based context. Core courses for the MLIS/MIS degree usually include statistics and research, as well as a course on…