Preparation for library management: contribution of the library schools

Too often in the past we have been content with vocational training in technical skills; this contentment both arose from and helped to give rise to relatively static situations. Today, when one of our greatest certainties is the inevitability of change we need ‘to prepare individuals who will be not only competent to perform and manage the present systems but who, through their educational experience, will have the necessary insight, imagination and habits of mind, needed to improve and to enhance the system by adapting and advancing it to meet its future requirements’ (P. Wasserman). Within the last decade the provision of facilities for education and qualification in librarianship has broadened and diversified to a degree which is complex, not to say confusing. This variety of provision is to be commended and is both natural and correct for our present situation. Today it is impossible to set down one definitive pattern of education for librarianship and regard it as the ideal. It is improbable that a curriculum could be agreed by all and not everything important in education appears in a curriculum.