A conversation about LIS education and library practices

The relationship between LIS education and library practices (what the relationship is, what the relationship should be, et al.) is one of the most heavily discussed topics in this field.

Andy Woodworth's blog post "Ten Things You Won’t Find On Your LIS Class Syllabus" is the last article I have ever read and made me think a lot about this topic. You can say that I have been thinking about the gaps between LIS education and the every day practices until now. And this blog post is kind of a brief reflection on this topic. In his post, Andy offered a lot of his suggestions to LIS students about the aspects that LIS education fails to cover, for example, the "new vs. old librarians" meme, many of which are very interesting in the light of New Librarianship.

Several days ago, I posted this question on Facebook. My question was:

There is definitely a gap between library science education and every day practices. But what's that?

A number of replies were received, including:

• Business/financial training
• Management
• Actual hands on practice
• Conversations/collaboration with practitioners and marketing
• There is a disconnection with what the field actually needs right now
• Community engagement/public affairs

From this list, you can see the inputs from both library students and library practitioners. You can say that all these ideas are very important. I interviewed a manager in Bird Library several weeks ago. The lack of management training is one of the topics he mentioned during the interview. And I have been wondering about the business model (economics) of libraries, behind the huge dispute around eBooks and other topics. However,\ the most interesting reply I got was from Aaron Tay, a senior librarian from Singapore. He asked, was there really a gap?

I don't think there is a standard answer to this question. People from different backgrounds definitely have different opinions. His answer kind of reminded me of the blog post written by Prof. Lankes about how librarians should be positive about our expertise and future. In this sense, I feel so lucky that I am in SU. I can see people around me are trying the best to engage with libraries and library practitioners in the real world. Prof. Lankes himself has a close relationship with the practitioners. Moreover, 511, which is like the most realist class I have ever taken (or a "worldview" class as what Prof. Lankes calls it),  is also a very practical one, in which we need to finish all kind of tasks in groups, some of which are tied closely with the real world, like MOOC.

But I do think that, even in here, there may still be a gap between what we are doing as a student and what we are going to do as a librarian. Last week's 605 was one of the few cases where I have sensed the gap. Mallory and I gave this presentation about database for the reference class. I think this class is very practice-based; however, when I read the textbook, I cannot stop doubting that some of the information is out-of-date or maybe too idealist. So we tried to make this presentation practice-based rather than textbook-based. There were some differences we can observe, which I hope I can talk about in the future.

I have been a librarian. However, sadly, my past experiences cannot help me a lot in this issue. First, I worked in China. Second, the librarianship in China is not as professional as in the US.

I think this question will be one of the questions that will haunt me a lot in the future. However, hopefully, I can become a better librarian in the future after I try all the means to answer it.