The Current Landscape of the School Librarianship Curricula in USA

摘要

The current landscape of the School Librarianship educational programs and curricula of master's degrees in the USA has been explored. The master's programs are currently offered in the following four venues: (1) programs that are American Library Association (ALA) accredited but not American Association of School Librarians (AASL) recognized, i.e., ALA Only; (2) AASL recognized but not ALA accredited, i.e., AASL Only; (3) both ALA accredited and AASL recognized, i.e., Both; and (4) neither recognized nor accredited, i.e., Neither. The objectives of this study are to examine the characteristics of the School Librarianship programs and to investigate and compare the topical coverage of School Librarianship curricula across four different venues. For this study, a total of 1,150 course titles and descriptions of 84 School Librarianship master's degree programs were collected. In the analysis, both manual classification and automated machine classification using Latent Semantic Analysis have been applied to discover the characteristics and the topical coverage of School Librarianship curricula. Some major findings of this study are as follows: First, the similarity of four School Librarian-ship curricula from four venues in terms of program features is uncovered as: AASL Only-Neither-Both-ALA Only. Second, the most popular topic/class in the coverage of library science courses is the "Services to User populations." Third, in terms of the topical coverage of non-library science courses, the AASL Only encompasses the broadest coverage, which is followed by, in decreasing order of coverage: AASL Only, Neither, and Both. The empirical results provide crucial comparative data for School Librarianship programs contemplating future or current changes in response to changing technological and vocational demands.