Librarians and MLIS Students (in China)

My last blog post talked about the idea that you don't have to hold an MLIS degree to become a true librarian. But even after proposing this quite heretic idea, in most of the cases, I do believe it's a really good thing that all the librarians hold an MLIS degree.

When I was a librarian in China, I was actually very surprised that most of the Chinese librarians did not have an MLIS degree (including me for sure). In my library (which is the major public library in Beijing, in case you don't know), the percentage of the librarians with an MLIS degree is lower than 10%. For a number of good academic libraries and top public libraries, the number may be higher. But for most of the public libraries, this number is even lower than us. During the last five years, I found a lot of reasons to explain this phenomenon.

I think the most important reason here is that the library science education in China is largely seen as unrelated with library practices. When I talked to other librarians in the Chinese library community, one comment I heard a lot was that, those library professors did not understand what was going on in libraries. As a result, for library practitioners, the ideas proposed by library science professors are unrealistic in many cases. While on the other hand, for many professors, the developments of most of the libraries are not satisfactory at all. The point here is not which side is right, which side is wrong. They are both right and wrong. I think the point is that, unlike the landscape in the US, there is a lack of communication and trust between the two sides because of some really profound reasons. (In China, you can hear people talking about "profound reasons" a lot. This expression is largely an excuse of people's "having no choice", like an article in Lonely Planet said. So I think I should try to avoid this cynicism, and think deeper about this issue.)

I have not attended any library school in China. As a result, I have little knowledge about what's REALLY going on there. But I do have some connections (which is another expression in the article mentioned above) with library students or people working in library schools. Moreover, my library once had a training session for librarians in cooperation with the library school in Beijing Normal University. I attended this project, and had some really bad experiences.

One the one hand, compared with the curriculum in American library schools, the courses in China are much further away from practices. In the project organized by my library and iSchool, BNU, there was even a course about database. However, the course was taught poorly. The teacher just talked about what elements did a database normally have, and how did they look like, and things like this, without any exercises. I understand the project was only an ad hoc project rather than a real course in the school. However, I still don't think the knowledge taught in a real course had strong connections with what's going on in libraries. This partly explains why many directors in public libraries (again, including the library I used to work) like recruiting students from other professions rather than library schools. One of the comments I heard our director saying a lot was that, librarians need expertise of other professions; what you do in a library is easily to be learnt. Is that so easy? I certainly don't think so. However, this is a popular mindset among library directors in China.

But on the other hand, there are even more problems in the libraries. It's hard to talk about Chinese libraries as a whole, because there are big differences between public libraries, academic libraries and special libraries. There are even greater differences between individual libraries in these categories. But it's a fact that Chinese libraries, especially public libraries, are not doing a good job. They should have done a better job as expected by the public and the professors. But in this case, the "having no choice" expression comes out again. We have some many limitations in terms of management structure and the governance. I don't want to make this issue too complex (which is really complex though). In short, all the Chinese public libraries belong to the government; and in China, the power of the government is so strong and omnipresent, especially in the "culture industry" (in China, the library is categorized into the broader term "culture industry"). The government tends to censor everything in this area. Sometimes, even new ideas come out from librarians, they cannot be implemented because the government is afraid of these ideas; or at least librarian directors think so. Moreover, in most of the cities, like Beijing, public libraries on different levels belong to different levels of governments. For example, the library I used to work, the Public Library of Chinese is part of the Government of Beijing Municipality; while district libraries in Beijing belong to different district governments. It makes extremely hard to harmonize the efforts of different library entities in the same city, and present a uniform brand to the public.

Also, living in Beijing is really hard. Librarians definitely earn much less than people in other professions. So working in Beijing as a librarian is naturally not the best decision an MLIS student can make, who has the ability to take other better paid jobs; not to mention the fact that, many libraries don't like them at all.

Another factor may be that, Chinese libraries (again, especially public libraries) are still publicly seen as the repositories of books. Namely everyone, when they think about libraries, they think about print books. My colleagues used to make a user survey about digital resources. The result of this survey indicates that, many people have no idea what is "digital resource" in the context of a library. This factor, combining the low earning, explains why the social status of librarians is very low in China.

Above is a brief version of this story. For some parts of the story, my narrative is over-simplified. One of these parts is the differences between different libraries in China. There are certainly very good libraries in China, most of which are academic and special ones, like the National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Science. One of the reasons is that, it's a library located in a purely academic institution, thus, there are relatively less institutional barriers. Another reason is that, the director of the library, Dr. Xiaolin Zhang, is a truly creative library leader even around the world. You can never underestimate the library leader's influences on a specific library, especially in China.

I used to think the situations in the US are just opposite to China, that most of the librarians hold an MLIS degree. However, last year, when I read Ken Haycock's book Portable MLIS, I was surprised to find that the percentage of American public librarians who hold an MLIS was much lower than I expected too (though much higher than in China). On the other hand, with the increasing importance of subject librarians, American libraries, especially academic libraries, have a stronger need to have librarians with an MLIS degree as well as a doctor's degree in another field. Again, the real world is too complex to fit into any simple schema.

This blog post is supposed to be the first blog post about some of my thoughts about library management after taking IST 600 Collaborating Effectively in the summer. The point I want to make here is that, when I was in China, I always thought that the librarianship in the US was totally different with the one in China. However, I have know that my previous thought was too simple. For sure, there are a lot of differences, especially in terms of political environment, institutional structure and the culture. But there are also a lot of spaces for improvement in Chinese librarianship. From the strategical level, we should keep the confidence that everything can be better. And in the next few posts, I hope I can cover the topics about how to actually turn things better in China and what I (and everyone) can do to achieve the goals.