Todd Gilman Says Recent job postings and hires suggest that many academic libraries are losing interest in hiring humanities Ph.D.’s. As a librarian at Yale University who has watched the job market in recent years, I’ve noticed a rather disturbing turn of events — one that is gaining steam and undermining the likelihood that M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s in the humanities will be able to choose librarianship as a career.
Many recent job postings for humanities librarians, reference librarians, or those specializing in research education do not list subject expertise as a requirement.
Oy
In an academic setting, you want the happy medium. You do not want the scholar who has trouble dealing with whoever may approach with a question. You do not want an outgoing person who is utterly clueless who cannot use the finding tools at their disposal. Somewhere in between is what you need on the front line.
This piece also totally denigrates the work of catalogers. Without cataloging, could a library even function? With a good catalog, sometimes having a subject matter expert is not necessarily essential. The broad brush strokes this article need to use to paint every academic library as something akin to Yale or Harvard when frankly they are not. A small college that trains only ministers could easily have only thirty thousand volumes yet be accredited by SACS and not need a subject expert in whatever is the current hip trend in English specialization. Cataloging’s purpose is to be the finding tool that everybody uses without necessarily needing to be an expert.
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Stephen Michael Kellat, Host, LISTen
Too many humanities librarians?
In my experience, a strong majority of academic librarians come from the humanities. It therefore makes sense from a supply-and-demand analysis that adding an advanced humanities degree to an MLIS degree isn’t going to automatically improve one’s marketability relative to the applicant pool.
Humanities advanced degrees
Humanities advanced degrees are a dime a dozen in libraries. I also found his assuming the chosen candidate not having a MA or PhD meant they were under qualified or naive and malleable to be insulting. There are plenty of other qualifications that they may have brought to the table.
Makes good points though
I’m not sure how Gilman’s essay denigrates catalogers, though I agree with MichaelK that there are important hiring considerations aside from subject expertise (I.T. knowledge being a big one for technical services).
I think we should listen to Gilman, though, when he points out how the current trend can hurt libraries and librarians. Especially in the case of collection development, it makes sense to have someone with the academic chops to be able to make good selection decisions and with the credentials and credibility to be able to meet with faculty on their own terms. At the very least, it seems hard to argue against having faculty members serve on subject-specialist search committees.