Preparation of School Library Media Specialists in the United States
Recruiting and preparing the next generation of school library media specialists (SLMSs) is a growing concern nationwide. School library media preparation programs are critical to meeting the current shortage of SLMSs in the United States. To determine the status of professional preparation programs for SLMSs, surveys were sent to forty-eight American Library Association (ALA)-accredited library education programs and 155 programs that prepare SLMSs but are not accredited by the ALA. Specifics related to the percentages of students and faculty in this specialization, the fulland part-time status of students, and the numbers of students enrolled were addressed in this survey. The survey further sought to determine the status of distance education opportunities, the internship as part of the school-media curriculum, and recruitment efforts of school library media preparation programs, school districts, state departments of education, and professional organizations.
Education of School Librarians
This chapter discusses education of school librarians. The influence of education for librarianship on the growth and development of school libraries was undeniable. As long as the growth of school libraries was confined to secondary schools, the formal education provided for librarians had a degree of appropriateness for school librarians. School libraries were instituted with personnel often limited by these conditions. Recent advances in education for school librarianship must be judged against a backdrop of insufficiency and inadequacy, and the United States is perhaps the only country to have made remarkable advancements. The efforts in those countries to which constant reference has been made, namely, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have been less spectacular in this area than in the growth and development of their school libraries or in their contributions to the advancement of school librarianship in general. Education for librarianship in a formal manner began in the United States a little over one hundred years ago; the English moved from correspondence courses to full-time courses in library schools in the same hundred years.
Librarians as Professionals
UPTHROUGH THE 1950s, and even into the early 1960s, a student of the professions could say: “Everywhere in American life, the professions are triumphant. ...The college graduates of today are. ..convinced that the future belongs to the professions. ..”l without danger of dissent from listeners or readers. By the early 1970s, a similar audience concurrence would greet a statement like this: “Everyone is down on the old-style concept of professionalism today: those who are served by professionals. ..the students. ..the paraprofessionals. . . and finally, many practicing professionals themselves.”e While neither of these statements was meant to refer to librarianship as such (indeed, their authors would probably not have admitted librarians to the august company of professionals at all), the shift in attitude they reflect is a pretty accurate description of the change among librarians in their outlook toward professional status. What happened to cause such a reversal? Well, what happened between the 1950s and the 1970s was: the 1960s. This term, “the 1960s,” will be used throughout this paper as a generalized designator for that period, and more loosely for the viewpoint that characterized it: a posture of dissidence, questioning and revolt against the Establishment that for librarians sprang already full-grown into the 1969 conference of the American Library Association (ALA) in Atlantic City. This viewpoint had its roots in the 1950s and still has its adherents in the 1970s; as the reader will discover, many of the more cogent statements of this “1960s viewpoint” will be from publications