As an apprentice library school educator (I’ve completed two years of PhD course work and I taught a library school course two summers ago), what’s most striking to me is how little evidence we collect about the academic achievements of the students we recruit and their relative success after graduation. Williamson recognized the importance of this data and did as much as he could to collect, analyze, and publish this information in his reports. Sadly, almost 100 years later, we still don’t consistently publish information about standardized test scores for library school applicants or matriculates, their undergraduate GPAs, our acceptance rates, students’ salaries before and after library school, or how long it takes graduates to find a job. We don’t have the sort of certification that Williamson advocates, and we haven’t come up with an alternative way to assess the knowledge students acquire in the pursuit of their degree. We have no useful longitudinal studies about the career arcs of graduates. We have a truckload of values, but the lawyers and the MBAs have actual data. Until we have something resembling empirical evidence, it’s difficult to believe that we’ll make any rational reforms. Even if we did, how would we know?

That said, I think the library of 2112 is going to require far, far greater understanding of technology than we typically impart. It’s not just that new librarians should be able to look at the Meadville Public Library in Pennsylvania and think, “That’s cool, they’re using open source software.” The goal should be for new graduates to be able to critique their choices and contribute to even better software than Meadville is currently using. I’ll know we’re headed in the right direction when the postings at jobs.code4lib.org are being filled by overqualified new library school graduates.

You leave me with a question, that may be best answered by others, using your article as a jumping-off point. If those of us who teach in library schools are teaching for the 1912 library, then what do we need to be specifically teaching for the 2112 library? Values, like those expressed in the article, we already do by the truckload through every unit we teach – if we are doing are job right.