Clarifying Jurisdiction in the Library Workforce: Tasks, Support Staff, and Professional Librarians

Jurisdiction refers to those tasks or responsibilities that are seen as central to and exclusively controlled by a profession. When library work is examined, what is the proper jurisdiction for professional, masters-level librarians? This study examines the definition of professional with respect to library workers by using data from a national survey of competencies for library support staff and by comparing American Library Association-approved competencies for beginning MLS librarians and certified support staff. According to this analysis, professional librarians are those who know context (history, theory), do research, educate patrons, and manage people and collections. They are not necessarily those who provide direct services. Introduction What does it mean to say that some people who work in a library are professionals—and others are not? People within librarianship are separated by a vertical line from other professions, and by horizontal lines demarking levels of library work. Vertically, there are more or less permeable boundaries between librarianship and data management, curation/ preservation, education generally, instructional technology, administration/organizational management, and specialized subject knowledge. Horizontally, within library work, there are boundaries primarily oriented around the iconic master’s degree (MLS): who has it, who does not; who is a professional, who is support or specialist staff. A key part of understanding the nature and evolution of professions is the concept of “jurisdiction”: who is allowed to do what; the work that each profession performs and controls (Abbott, 1988, 1998). Jurisdiction is constantly changing in response to developments in technology (i.e., 289 applegate/clarifying jurisdiction mechanization/computerization of functions that were formerly expert work), clientele (employer preferences, such as for in-house control of expertise and work product), and competition (alternative professions claiming expertise). Examples include computer-assisted drafting in architecture, off-shoring of information technology in accounting, and use of advanced-practice nurses for primary health care. Current librarianship encounters Google, ChaCha, and KGB used for short-answer reference work, aides assigned to run school libraries, and instructional technologists assisting faculty with classroom information preparation. The library workforce includes a wide range of roles. The MLS degree exists as a semi-bright line, in many libraries, in many roles, dividing “professional” librarians from “support staff,” variously termed paraprofessionals, staff, and clerks. The MLS acts as a “trait” marker for professional status, but a trait itself is not synonymous with jurisdiction. Persons in the professions of nursing and medicine both claim some jurisdiction over the diagnosis of medical conditions, even though by “traits” their professions are brightly distinct. Jurisdiction over library work is a very contentious issue on a micro as well as philosophical level—sometimes easy to glide over in day-to-day life but disturbing when considered as part of a trend toward or away from some ideal. Who catalogs items? Who is a cataloger? Who does reference work? Who is a reference librarian? Different library workplaces practice different answers at different times—and who a librarian is, is in part defined by who non-librarians are. The American Library Association has developed a national (voluntary) certification system for library support staff (LSS), with sets of universal and specialized competencies. The process involved substantial input from a panel of experts, from organizations, and from surveys answered by thousands of LSS, MLS, and director respondents. Simultaneously, the ALA designed and published a set of core competencies for MLS librarians. This article: • reviews several perspectives on the concept of “profession,” with special attention to jurisdiction and within-field/internal divisions; • analyzes data generated by the ALA certification project about the roles of support staff in academic and public libraries; • compares the desired or expected roles of LSS to those identified as the specific jurisdiction of MLS librarians. All of this speaks to the division of labor in libraries, and to increased clarity regarding intra-librarianship jurisdiction. Literature Review The definition of profession as a sociological phenomenon has been the subject of much research and theorizing both broadly as a concept and 290 library trends/summer & fall 2010 individually in particular fields of work (Carter, 2007). Ways of conceptualizing professions can be roughly grouped into four types of approaches— those that focus on: a profession in itself, a profession in relation to nonprofessionals/lay people, a profession in competition with or relation to other professions, and intra-profession competition or relationships. A “trait” definition of profession examines each individual field of work and group of workers—each profession in itself. Their structure and characteristics are measured against a series of “traits” that are thought to define what a profession is. Some of the common elements of a set of profession traits include an advanced knowledge domain involving specialized initial and continuing education, an ethical code, and high autonomy in practice (Leicht & Fennell, 2001, p. 26). The trait approach has always posed some problems for librarianship. Librarianship has primarily been not only practiced in, but to a large extent defined by, institutions. Doctors are independent of hospitals and lawyers are partner-owners but only in some areas of information brokering do individual librarians have their own economic relations with clients. Organized librarianship has a well-established code of ethics, but there is no mechanism for enforcement, so it is aspirational rather than pragmatically effective. Nor is there an ongoing, professionally organized continuing education requirement. Librarianship is not alone in these deviations. Even occupations that are traditionally considered professions, such as teaching, nursing, and the military, do not all match all traits proposed. The main focus of the trait approach is singular and inward: does each individual occupation match a hypothetical ideal set of characteristics? Different professions exist only as points for mental comparison: how does the Library Bill of Rights compare to the Hippocratic Oath, as a system of ethics? Another approach focuses on distinguishing professionals from nonprofessionals. One item in the trait approach is the complexity of the knowledge domain (Leicht & Fennell, 2001; also see Honea, 2000). This is bound together with another commonly included trait—a long period of education and/or apprenticeship that is needed to attain mastery of complex subject matter, coupled sometimes with continuing education requirements. Complexity serves to create and define by differentiating professionals from nonprofessionals in two important ways. The lengthy education provides group socialization: doctors are those who have all gone through internships. Then, the quantity and complex quality of the knowledge needed excludes outsiders from offering opinions on the areas in which the profession practices. In librarianship, the definition of profession has relied heavily on this feature, as seen in both educational qualifications and job classifications or wording. Librarians are frequently defined as those who possess a Master’s of Library Science (i.e., ALA, “Becoming a Librarian”); the Master’s of Library Science degree is defined by most universities as a professional 291 applegate/clarifying jurisdiction degree; the ALA-MLS is legally considered a bona fide occupational qualification, at least for academic library hiring (Merwine v. Board of Trustees, 1985). The creation of a unitary set of competences for the beginning MLS-level librarian implies a general and also complex set of knowledge. Professional program accreditation by the American Library Association reinforces this aspect; the ALA accredits only master’s level programs, not doctoral nor paraprofessional programs. Therefore in experience (graduate school courses), in job requirements (ALA-MLS required), and in knowledge (theory and practice of information organization, instruction, preservation, etc.), professionalism in librarianship is pragmatically defined against people who have not had these experiences and attained this knowledge. A profession can also be seen as collective economic actor: that is, a group which consciously controls and indeed monopolizes certain tasks (Seibert, 2007; Friedman, 2002 [1962]). This is the view of a profession that successfully defines and economically defends itself in opposition to other professions (not nonprofessionals as in the previous point). For example, only lawyers may practice law; in the United Kingdom, only barristers may appear in court; in the United States only tax lawyers, accountants, and enrolled agents may represent someone with the IRS. Formal occupational monopoly is a challenge for librarianship. School libraries offer a stark and visibly volatile example of the problem of monopoly. Are school library media specialists “classified” (professional, certified) personnel? Does every library require a professional? Does every school need a library? Wiegand (1999) argues that the early entrance of women into librarianship as a profession was in some respects accepted because those in power saw librarianship as auxiliary and not central; it did not matter that women were included because librarianship was not important, a monopoly not worth enforcing. The relation of professions to each other is a next step and a crucial part of understanding not only what a profession is at one point in time but how each profession is created, changes, develops, and possibly disappears. The work of Abbott (1988) is particularly useful in developing a competitive functional understanding of professions. He focused on the concept of “jurisdiction” to describe those areas that are considered to be the proper and exclusive task of each profession. Each task exists as a sort of contest over which profession shall exercise control. This perspective analyzes professions as they exist in competition with each other—not (only) with the mass of all nonprofessionals. This has played an important part in the historical development of individual professions and is a lively issue in all professions. Who can prescribe? Who draws blood? Who counsels people with mental health issues? This is seen vividly within academic libraries, special libraries, and the information industry. Who selects doctoral-level research 292 library trends/summer & fall 2010 materials—librarians or PhD people within the field? Who assists professors with integrating information resources into online courses—librarians or instructional technologists? Who designs library retrieval systems— librarians or computer programmers? One thing the preceding perspectives share is that they focus on each profession as primarily a vertically homogenous unit. That is, doctors may be a profession; doctors differ from non-doctors; and psychiatrists compete with psychologists over mental health care, but each profession, however horizontally related to other professions or divided from the mass of unskilled workers, is primarily seen as unitary within itself. Bucher and Strauss (1961) add the notion of “segmentation” to describe subsets within professions, important ways in which significant groups within acknowledged professional boundaries differ from each other and may differ from that group’s apparent defining characteristics, such as doctors who do not see patients. However, they are all still doctors. This leaves out intra-occupational analysis. Where is the boundary drawn within a field or occupation itself between people who are considered professionals and those who are not, but who nevertheless work in the field and thus are considered in a sense to be in the same group as the professionals? Wiegand’s description of librarianship as a profession lays out four elements: institution, expertise, authority, and character (1989). To possess the right “character” is to be a member of the accepted “normative” class in society, and was originally, and continues to be, achieved by requiring a bachelor’s level of education, in liberal arts, before entering professional education. This model contrasts with some other routes into “librarianship.” Before the late 1990s, there were numerous bachelor’slevel library science programs, and for media specialists undergraduatelevel preparation was common. Other countries in Asia and Europe also use a bachelor’s level preparation or have library science as the field of study from the beginning of post-secondary education (Audunson, 2007). But in general, to define librarians as those possessing graduate level qualifications again restricts analysis only to that homogenous group, ignoring library workers of other types. Much of the literature on the definitions and dynamics of librarianship as a profession has been devoted to describing how or to what extent librarianship or library science or information science have the traits associated with the definition of profession, or proposing new conceptual models (e.g., Wiegand, 1999), or exploring tensions between practice/ practitioners and theory or the academic disciplinary aspects of the study of librarianship (e.g., Cronin & Davenport, 1996). There is a separate literature on staffing, which ranges from broad prevalence studies (e.g., Johnson, 1996, Brunsting, 2008), to classificatory arguments (e.g., Jones & Stivers, 2004), to individual case studies (Fama & Martin, 2009) and personal perspectives (Hill, 2008) in which the assignment of tasks to 293 applegate/clarifying jurisdiction particular classes of library employees is described. These often have no theoretical background; on occasion the literature references ethics or defining values of librarianship as a whole (e.g., Dowell, 2003). There appears to be no large source of empirical data on how people who work in libraries view their own tasks, across a range of library types, library positions, and library worker levels. Research Question This study uses a set of empirical data and two sets of profession statements to explore directly the question of jurisdiction or task authority, within levels of librarianship. It examines intra-librarian status identification not through traits but in relation to task jurisdiction. This is an inductive approach. It looks for clues in practice that can be used to create a schema for distinguishing levels of professional and support staff work. The data set is a major national opt-in survey of librarians, library directors, and support staff concerning knowledge and skills (competencies) that should or should not be considered important for library support staff in academic and public libraries. Respondents to the survey rated each individual item as to whether it was not important, important, and very important, for library support staff. Because this is a post-facto analysis of a survey that was not specifically designed to measure opinions about jurisdiction itself, there are limitations to the analysis that can be conducted. Nevertheless, it presents a set of empirical observations from a wide range of library respondents that can illuminate some of the current questions about intra-librarian identity. This analysis first uses quantitative data from the national survey to identify areas where there is general agreement or disagreement on the support staff role. It then conducts a qualitative analysis of the items to identify themes. The results of this analysis are then compared with differences between the sets of LSS and MLS competencies/competences, as approved by the American Library Association in 2009. These represent current expert and politically (organizationally) validated perspectives on roles and jurisdictions within work in libraries and information agencies. The MLS competencies are more broadly stated and focused than the LSS, which were intentionally focused on only academic and public library settings. Methodology The source of the empirical data on individual opinions is a survey distributed by the American Library Association Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) concerning competencies for library support staff. The survey had over 3,500 respondents, making it the largest pool of respondents on any ALA topic in recent times. While the survey was created for evaluative and program planning purposes, not research, use of its data for further 294 library trends/summer & fall 2010 research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. The purpose of the survey was to provide practitioner input into the design of sets of competencies for library support staff in academic and public libraries, as the foundation for a nationally-recognized ALA-administered individual certification system for support staff, the ALA-Library Support Staff Certification Project (LSSCP). The LSSCP focused on academic and public libraries as the largest and more homogeneous constituencies of library support staff; school, special, and other types of libraries were considered to either have their own standards (e.g., state guidelines for media specialists) or to differ too widely (special) to be included in the initial certification project. Survey Content: Competencies The survey consisted of twelve competency sets: areas of work within libraries that library support staff engage in. Three competency sets were general to all library work, while nine were more functionally specialized: General: • Foundations of Library Service • Technology • Communications and Teamwork Functional: • Cataloging [including acquisitions] • Collection Development • Reference • Public Programming • Reader’s Advisory • Youth Services • Marketing • Management and Supervision Within each competency set, there were two sets of statements. One was stated in terms of knowledge: the library support staff should know X. The other was stated in terms of behavior or skills: library support staff should be able to do Y. There were from nine to twenty statements in each competency set. Survey respondents could choose any or all of the eleven areas to review. One of the areas had two separate subgroups: cataloging and acquisitions. In June 2009, the ALA approved the program and in January 2010, the LSSC program began to accept what the ALA called candidates. The finalized competency sets for the program were adjusted according to the input from the survey and from deliberations by experts in each area. Two areas were deleted entirely (Programming and Marketing) and Acquisitions, Collection Development, and Cataloging were reorganized. 295 applegate/clarifying jurisdiction The first analysis discussed here is based on the original survey’s wording, and not on the finalized competencies that are reviewed later. Respondents could choose to address any or all of the competency sets. While responding to each statement was optional (completion was not required), more than 95 percent of those responding to any set rated all of the statements. For each statement, the rating scale was, “not important” (1), “important” (2), and “very important” (3). In analysis, these were treated mathematically as Likert-type interval data. The lists of statements were created by the staff and advisory council of the LSSCP. These consisted of library consultants with extensive background in competency and certification programs (Karen Strege, Nancy Bolt) and representatives from constituent associations within ALA such as: library type (Association of College and Research Libraries—ACRL and the Public Libraries Association—PLA); library function (Reference and User Services Association—RUSA), and support staff (Library Support Staff Interests Round Table—LSSIRT). Given this, it is not surprising that the survey respondents considered almost all of the proposed competencies to be at least “important.”