Creating a New Era of Expanded Opportunity for all: How Librarians can Lead us there

Abstract

Purpose – This chapter explains how the library profession is well-suited to developing and delivering library services that target the growing opportunity gap in the United States and identifies barriers to advancing this professional objective more widely in public libraries. The chapter identifies leadership and organizational development, enhanced graduate training and continuing education, and the need to overcome excessive modesty and passivity as fundamental to advancing this role.

Approach – This chapter documents declining opportunity in the United States. It summarizes the history of librarians’ professional accomplishments and services, and recent public library projects that illustrate the aptitude, expertise, values, and culture necessary to address declining opportunity. Reviewing pertinent literature and the authors’ observations, this chapter identifies barriers librarians face in rising to this challenge and offers solutions.

Findings – Factors limiting public librarians’ ability to address declining opportunity include too few leaders with a vision for librarianship rising to pivotal challenges, such as declining opportunity, and the management skills or training necessary to develop librarians’ potential to target such objectives; professional modesty and passivity rooted in gender bias; absence of graduate training and continuing education in quantitative and qualitative analyses as applied to decision-making, basic evaluation, and advocacy; and inadequate understanding of research and its application to services that target declining opportunity.

Originality/Value – The chapter elucidates the underdeveloped capacity of professional librarians to apply their aptitude, expertise, and professional values to one of the greatest challenges of our era – the decline of opportunity in the United States – and outlines steps that will support that goal.

Citation

Davis, D., Miller, M. and Karmes-Jesonis, E. (2018), "Creating a New Era of Expanded Opportunity for all: How Librarians can Lead us there", Percell, J., Sarin, L.C., Jaeger, P.T. and Bertot, J.C. (Ed.) Re-envisioning the MLS: Perspectives on the Future of Library and Information Science Education (Advances in Librarianship, Vol. 44B), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 7-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0065-28302018000044B002