February 1, 2005
OBERLIN, OHIO - The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a second grant of $500,000 to six academic libraries to collaborate on a major project to address librarian recruiting and diversity issues at the undergraduate level. The award funds the second year-and-a-half of a three-year program.
The multi-faceted project includes broad-based, issues-oriented programming that familiarizes large numbers of undergraduate students with significant challenges facing the library profession and draws their attention to the potential of librarianship as a career. It also includes internship and scholarship opportunities for students who develop strong interest in the profession.
The libraries of the Atlanta University Center (serving Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse and Spelman Colleges) and of Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Occidental, Swarthmore, and Wellesley Colleges are participating in the collaborative project, which is directed by Ray English, Director of Libraries at Oberlin, and coordinated by Megan Kinney.
The initiative is helping to address the serious shortage of professional librarians in the United States that is projected for the future. Many libraries are already reporting difficulties filling librarian positions and recent studies estimate that as many as 60 percent of current librarians will reach retirement age by 2020.
The emphasis of the program is to recruit at the undergraduate level, rather than focusing on graduate library school or post-graduate years. The initiative is also designed to help broaden the racial and ethnic composition of the library profession so that it can serve increasingly diverse populations.
The cooperating campuses initiated the project in 2003. The initial broad-based program, which proved very popular with students, highlighted issues related to the USA PATRIOT Act and library patron privacy. The program for the fall of 2004 focused on the crisis in scholarly communication and the movement toward open access to scholarship.
Students who are strongly interested in librarianship as a career are selected to participate in a semester-long undergraduate internship experience designed to give them a thorough understanding of librarianship as a changing and dynamic profession that is critical to the strength of a democratic society. In addition to learning about the nature of professional library work, student participants complete projects under librarian mentors and may also participate in summer internships at other libraries.
The project also provides a small number of full-time, post-baccalaureate intern positions as well as graduate library school scholarships, both of which are awarded competitively among the participating institutions.
Media contact: Sandy Austin, Sandra.Austin@oberlin.edu, 440-775-5042.
