Education for librarianship: Some persistent issues

As education for librarianship approaches its centenary it is curious to note how many of the issues debated over the course of the last hundred years still remain unresolved today. Some of these are quite fundamental to the whole matter of education for a profession. In its strictly defined sense of formal full-time instruction, in an institution of higher education, specifically in librarianship, our professional education owes its origin to Melvil Dewey whose ideas of a ‘librarians’ college’, first publicly expounded in 1879, were realized in the School of Library Economy at Columbia College, New York (later Columbia University), which opened its doors on 5th January 1887 with an enrolment of twenty students and Dewey himself as Professor of Library Economy. Ten years earlier Dewey had been present at the Conference of Librarians in London where he heard two librarians from Oxford, Charles H. Robarts of All Souls’ College, supported by Henry O. Coxe, Bodley’s Librarian, put forward a radical and complex scheme for uniting their two institutions to provide for, among other objectives, a ‘School of Librarians’. Nothing was to come of this proposal, and education for librarianship in Britain and in the United States were to follow distinctly different paths. However, many of the issues contended over have been markedly similar on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps because rooted in the nature of professional education itself and in the shared Anglo-American tradition of librarianship rather than in specific national differences.