Education for music librarianship within the United States: Content analysis of selected documentation and structured interviews with selected practitioners.

摘要

The literature of many different types of special librarianship, as practiced within the United States, includes a long-standing debate concerning the specific generic and subject-related knowledge and skills to be acquired during the special librarian's professional education. This debate is particularly heated within specialities devoted to archives, business/corporate, law, medicine, and music.; Using a specially designed classification scheme, three different types of written documentation were analyzed in this study: (1) the latest educational competency statements developed by the Society of American Archivists, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association, the Music Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association, (2) entry-level job descriptions published during 1995--1999 by the Music Library Association's Placement Service, and (3) the composite results of a written questionnaire and structured telephone or E-mail interviews with forty-two recent graduates who became first-time professional music librarians sometime during 1995--1999.; Conclusions related to the competency statements indicated that: (1) technology, whether subject-specific or general, was quite frequently cited in four of the statements, with the exception of music, (2) reference/research services earned the highest rating in three of the five documents, while management, theory/terminology, applied subject skills, and research methods were also cited frequently, (3) in addition to areas of commonality among all of the statements, each separate document emphasized knowledge and skills which were invaluable to the practice of that specific type of special librarianship.; Findings related to the job descriptions indicated that, of the ten most frequently cited themes within the job descriptions analyzed, six were subject-specific, while four were general in nature.; Major conclusions from the questionnaire and structured interviews were: (1) the five most frequently cited, highly subject-specific competencies mentioned by the forty-two practitioners who responded to the telephone or E-mail structured interviews related to cataloging, reference/research services, technology, management, and instruction, and (2) very few generalizations related to the overall improvement of curriculum-based education for other types of special librarianship should be made from the results of this study, without the benefit of additional research.