Library Education in the U.S.

Michael Lorenzen (2001) asserted that from the very beginning of academic library instruction in the United States, it was noted that lecturing was not necessarily the most effective way of educating students about the library. Many key actors in developing library education argued in favor of active learning rather than lectures as the primary and best approach to providing future librarians with an in-depth understanding of the profession and its demands. Building upon concepts advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, academic librarians implemented a program of active learning that began to be implemented in the late nineteenth century with the goal of ensuring that librarians would become scholars. It is this fundamental orientation that has over time shaped library science education programs.

There have been generally five periods in the development of library education. Wilson and Hermanson (1998) identify these periods as before Melvil Dewey, from Melvil Dewey to Williamson, from approximately 1919 to 1939, from approximately 1940 to 1960, and from 1960 to the present. Prior to Melvil Dewey's efforts to develop the first formal library school at Columbia University in 1887, as early as 1829 the need for a library training school was recognized by Martin Schrettinger in Munich. However, it would be the work of Melvil Dewey in the United States that would establish formal training programs for

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ty of different library settings (Ostler & Dahlin, 1995). Some critics of Melvil Dewey, including Ostler and Dahlin (1995), suggest that while his contributions bordered on genius in terms of promoting library operations, he led library education astray by placing too much emphasis on practical operations in libraries and too little on the theoretical underpinnings that should guide thd practice of librarianship. Thus, throughout the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries, library education was largely pragmatic, operationally oriented, and lacking in theoretical foundations. Over time, the profession has experienced a paradigm shift, a major change in the way that librarians do their work and understand their profession (Ostler & Dahlin, 1995). In discussing this paradigm shift, Lorenzen (2001) makes the point that the 50 years from 1880 to 1930 represented a false dawn of the academic library instruction movement. While a foundation was laid for academic library instruction at that time, this approach remained dormant in the library profession from the late 1930s until the early 1960s. Despite the fact that the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago was founded in 1926
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Approximate Word count = 1338
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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