Because Dorothea Salo doesn't have comments enabled on her blog, I present this blog post by her for comments here:

"Is Librarianship a Profession?"

Thoughts?

Here's a thought of my own:

When the LSW was started, one idea I felt very strongly about was that anyone who had anything to do with libraries could be a full, participating, equal member, degree or no degree. The LSW makes no distinction between degreed professionals (that is, with some form of an MLS--and the fact that there's no standard degree is significant in itself) and library professionals (incuding part-time staff, library board members, Friends of the Library, etc) without a Master's degree in library/information studies/science.

Maybe it's too much of a generalization to say that our field is dominated by paraprofessionals, but this is certainly the case where I work.  We have 16 branches and only 2 branches with dedicated reference.  I work at a small community library with one librarian which is a branch manager, almost all reference is handled by the circulation clerks.  Granted we don't get the tough reference questions and when we're really stumped we do have a reference staff to call, but I would say that we handle 95% of our reference questions on our own.

Yes, I'm going to library school, but I have never once felt that any of one of my other colleagues couldn't handle reference, or any other of the tasks that we do in the branch.  We're a team, we work together, no matter what our background is.  As a matter of fact it is our diversity of background that makes my branch such an awesome place to work.

As a library school student, working in this capacity has been great experience, I get to see librarianship from all angles, not just from the reference desk.

An interesting debate, but an old debate too, I'm not sure if the sea of change will come in our lifetime or not, but I hope it does!

I found Dorothea's post fascinating, and an interesting take on things (most people don't seem to come at it from the labor perspective).  I'm not sure what, if anything, will change any time soon, but I do think she's right about the accreditation process.  If the MLS is our last stronghold of the "profession", we need to make sure that it *is* a stronghold.