There should be a "professor of the practice" Ph. D. in librarianship. I spoke to a mentor of mine on Tuesday about my frustration with the lack of a distance-ed Ph. D. program. We talked about different avenues of pursuing a Ph. D. including a computer science Ph. D. at Texas A&M, which would afford the opportunity of studying at the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries. I told her I wasn't really interested in a computer science Ph. D. and simply do not have an academic background that qualifies me for this program. She asked me what I wanted to do with a library science doctorate and if I wanted to teach. I told her I definitely didn't want to teach, I am interested in future library practice, especially synthesizing new technologies into mature production techniques in academic libraries. My ideal job would be working for OCLC Research. In response to this, she told me an unfortunate story. In her experience, library schools only want to accept and train future teaching and research faculty members. There should be, but is not, support in the discipline for a "professor of practice." She was speaking from experience, she earned a Ph. D. in higher education administration mid-career. This ties in with the reluctance of the profession to offer distance Ph. D. programs. There are myths that doctoral programs *must* be residential programs in order to socialize grad students into the profession and so that students have access to important research resources. These excuses are merely red-herrings. As a librarian with faculty status at an ARL library, I am socialized in the profession, I already conduct research, and I have access to a vast array of scholarly resources. I hope that our library and information schools find the right path soon, because I see them teetering toward irrelevancy. A recent Library Journal article indicates that ALA is reluctant to work with U. S. News to provide library school rankings. There is a dearth of professional information anyway and recruiting efforts are always a concern. Coupled with the profession's lack of enthusiasm of providing a doctorate-level education to its MLIS holding members, and it is no wonder that the innovations in librarianship are coming, more and more, from outside our profession, especially from computer science and vendor initiatives.
More DSpace wants: I'm about to go to ALA annual in a couple of weeks. The major ILS vendors will have booths to hawk their digital asset management systems (like ContentDM and Digitool), but I bet that the DSpace Federation won't have a booth. They should in order to promote DSpace and increase its user base. Also, I'm starting to think that DSpace should offer a refinement to its preservation policy. Currently, the bitstream registry defines the level of preservation by various file formats. Rather than doing this, it should set preservation policy by collection. Some collections will inevitably be more valuable than others, and I suspect in the future, preservation resources will be allocated according to economic considerations. A DSpace hosts limited resources would be best directed toward preserving collections that have greater value to an institution (such as PDFs an ETD collection) than minor collections (say, PDFs of a summary of a workshop held during an obscure conference.)
Bad research: Here are three quotes from a recent refereed article about cataloging electronic resources, all of which are absolutely untrue, misleading, and based on poor analysis. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is too common in our literature.
"A review of the literature reveals that there has been little discussion of exactly how remote access electronic resources should be described in the catalog record." Absolutely untrue. I can show you seventy articles, not to mention dozens of committees and conference programs where this topic has been discussed. I would also recommend that this person looks at AACR2 2002, the CONSER Cataloging Manual module 31, and various ALA committee proceedings including CC:DA and MARBI.
"With no national cataloging standards for guidance, cataloging agencies must rely on local cataloging practice to provide patrons with needed information." Absolutely untrue. See AACR2, CONSER Cataloging Manual, and OCLC's Bibliographic Formats and Standards, among other references.
"Catalogers usually assume that remote access electronic resources are exact reproductions of print works, and therefore the description of the print work will suffice for the electronic version." Absolutely untrue. Any cataloging training I've received for electronic resources notes the differences between them and their print equivalents. Furthermore there are many excellent articles that discuss the variations among multiple manifestations/formats of resources, including facsimiles, reproductions, and instances where the electronic version of a resource is either more or less complete.
