The talk I gave to Jean-François Blanchette’s class this month has turned out to be a twofer. I wrote earlier about the framework I have been toying with for thinking about preservation, but I was actually invited that day as a “guy who hires people”, and asked to talk about what I look for and how libraries are thinking about assembling their workforce.
Dr. Blanchette’s class had been talking about the skillset required of MLIS graduates and had read the SAA report “New Skills for a Digital Era.” I commend that report to your attention, along with AOTUS David Ferriero’s keynote and post about the competencies required in current librarians and archivists. With that sort of company, my own thoughts won’t add much except emphasis. I’ll turn the tables, instead, because I have some thought about what employers should be looking for in the new talent.
The biggest lesson I took from that morning was that I may have to start casting my lot with the “theory” side of the theory:practice debate. I’m comfortably past my first decade in library work, and realistically, all the hotshot skills I had when I graduated from IU SLIS are looking pretty stale. The ways of thinking, however, have stood me in good stead.
You are reading this via a WordPress website, for instance. WordPress is built on MySQL, using PHP, Javascript, HTML, and CSS. I learned almost nothing about the first two while I was in school (they were both 3 or 4 years new when I started school), but I learned Oracle/ColdFusion. Knowing one database/markup+scripting environment made the learning curve on a second one fast and easy. I did learn my way around HTML (version 4 was just coming out), CSS (it was in development at the time), and Javascript (the Ruby of 1999), but as you can see from the parenthetical, what school gave me were foundations more than enduring skills. What I really learned was how to script, how to think like a database, and how to do markup. That’s not capital-T theory, in and of itself, but it’s not plain-vanilla practical skills, either. Tellingly, it’s also not how I make my living as a librarian. (A programmer I am not.)
In fact, the way I make my living is by thinking about things, and to some extent, by thinking about things on behalf of people with practical skills. This is classic middle management and knowledge work, if you’ve read your Drucker. (N.B. to all LIS students reading this: Read your Drucker.) I also think it’s the signal aspect of library work: you interpret between. It may be a programmer and a user need, a patron and the reference collection, this collection and DACS, or the item in hand and the AACR2R. You do need some specific skills to enter the profession, but you’re going to be paid to think throughout your career, or in classic library scientific terms, to ontologize and systematize. The specific skills will change a little bit each year, the ways of thinking can last a decade.
So, fellow “people who actually hire people,” that’s where we need to take another look at recruitment. I got some sharp questions from that class. They’ve thought more about Portico than many of my colleagues, and no one is tapping their collection development budgets to pay Portico membership fees. Recruitment is an important way to get relevant skills in the door, we know that, but we have to be wary of too many project-focused hires, because recruitment is also the way to replenish our intellectual community. Our theory and thinking about the issues in our work does change, however gradually, and new LIS students give our organizations the equivalent of a fresh education.
I don’t get to spend the time with the professional literature that I’d like, and the time I do spend is increasingly shallow. A few times a year, I may settle in with a Big Report or Important Paper, but mostly I skim to keep abreast and I count on chatter with colleagues to keep me current. New LIS grads are a critical ingredient into that mix. I want to hear their chatter. They have read about the same topics I read about years ago, but did not the same books and articles that I read. here is common ground, but there is always a new crop of ideas coming out of our LIS programs, and it’s critical that we being those ideas into our organizations.