As a current MLIS student, working in IT at an academic library, I'm concerned that moving into a librarian position would mean a pay cut. I agree with you, Mike, that this fact can only harm the future of the profession. Librarians need the ability to quickly assimilate any number of technical skills. It's in libraries' own interest to hire technologists and programmers who also have experience with critical thinking in this area AND ARE ALSO familiar with (and use!) current reasearch, which usually means an MLS.

It's my assumption that in academic libraries "system librarians" or "web librarians" are expected to conduct, or at least confer with, ongoing research in library science and information behavior, but I may be way off base. Libraries need to attract librarians with an interest not just in technology, but with the desire to understand how different technologies work to evaluate the limitations of current solutions and propose better solutions.

The main reason behind the need for libraries to hire librarians who have experience as programmers is that the staff managers at libraries are almost always librarians. In a way, it is like having a union card because there's not much upward mobility in a library without an MLS. The problem this creates is that good managers need to understand the perspective of their staff, which is accomplished by having stood in their shoes, or even better: standing in their shoes. Good managers gain respect of their staff if they are involved with some of the programming and have an interest in current research in programming. Managers of IT staff should not be guided by buzzwords, which is what happens when the manager has little experience, yet tries to be the leader.

Welcome back to the blogosphere!

I absolutely think it's possible for folks to take alternative routes to library familiarity. Your example is a good one, as is Ross's, as is mine.

It does require search committees to do a bit more work on their requirements — namely to acknowledge these alternative routes and articulate them — and will require convincing some folks that while an MLS is a good indicator of library familiarity, it is not the only one. I see it as a potentially hard sell to some audiences, but I may be more cynical than some of the other folks in this conversation.

I was very careful to say that the MLS is useful, rather than necessary, in situations such as these.

I have to ask, though: if you already felt fully library-fied, why did you decide to shell out the tens of thousands of buckareenos for an MLS? :)

"If a position will need to interact with librarians or act in public services capacities, the MLS is very useful; folks from IT (or elsewhere in the extrabibliosphere) do not necessarily know our culture or our values — hell, they might not even speak our language. And there is something to be said for this sort of familiarity. Librarians hold the reins in libraries and if you can’t speak to their values in a language they understand, you are likely to spend much of your career tilting against windmills (and getting nowhere fast)."

Don't think it's possible for an IT person to learn the library culture and language without having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a degree? I feel that I learned plenty in my 6 years at Jenkins and my MLIS hasn't changed my knowledge of libraries, librarians, or their thinking and culture. The only part of libraries that I have learned more about was cataloging – and that's cause if you don't catalog then you don't learn cataloging … very profound!

Now, the three (or four) letters after one's name is of course an imperfect proxy measurement for that quality. Like all academic credentials are, but ML(I)S maybe especially so. Both false positives and false negatives.

But I do think it's important for there to be such people.

There may also be other tech workers in a library who _don't_ have special library interest/expertise, they are tech specialists brought in to solve particular tech problems. But there defintiely need to be a core of staff who _do_.

But yeah, there are other ways than requiring a degree to evaluate that quality. That really goes for degrees in general—I'm not a believer in assuming degrees correspond one-to-one with expertise or qualification.

Much of the code4lib community's resources are back online, but the personal and experimental stuff is taking longer. We're trying to come up with a solution that's sustainable and secure. Stay tuned!

You might shoot an e-mail to Ross, though.