Because we respond to communities and to changing cultural conditions, librarianship is a dynamic field. Our field is defined and represented by the work librarians, including you, do, and this work can and should change. It will change with an awareness of the past and how we’ve arrived at our present professional values and norms of practice. It will change with new knowledge, new priorities, and new ways of thinking about libraries and society.
These conditions mean that texts for librarians who are beginning their graduate education should also be responsive and adaptable. We planned Librarians Learning Together as an open online text that reflects the goals of our introductory core course for first-year students in the M.A. in LIS program at the University of Iowa. We see our course as helping students gain what the American Library Association calls “Gateway Knowledge,” or a sense of what the field is and how it has come to be this way that supports further learning. Its creation also reflects a fundamental reality about how we learn librarianship, which is together with other librarians and experts in cognate fields. Its format and platform allow us to undertake revisions with relative ease and to incorporate more librarians’ voices over time.
Our focus in Elements of Practice, or the first chapters of this book, is on how we think about libraries, what it means to be a librarian, and why we learn key policies and strategies that govern information access both for us and for library users. We supplement our ideas with short articles from American Libraries magazine, which were published to take note of key moments and questions in recent professional practice. We document sources that provide key ideas, and we suggest further resources that represent important and interesting voices that can help you delve more deeply into these issues. This means that our chapters in the first section of Librarians Learning Together typically have four key kinds of content: a narrative overview of the topic, a response that begins the conversation about this topic, along with discussion prompts and readings and other resources to support further learning. Student voices are also being added here to continue the conversation about our themes and to model strong work on the assignments in this course. In the second section of Librarians Learning Together, called Perspectives on Practice, we invite librarians to share their experiences in specific areas of the field and librarian roles.
We aspire, in the years ahead, to continue to grow this book beyond its current chapters. We see this happening in two different ways: First, by adding more student responses that contribute to and continue the conversation started on these digital pages; second, by considering additional topics that merit their own chapters. We look forward to hearing your voices as you work toward your learning in this course, toward your degree, and as a library professional.
Jennifer Burek Pierce, Ph.D., MLS, MA
Nancy A. Henke, MA, MLIS
