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By the end of calendar year 2006, the IMLS-funded "CIRLA Fellows
Program" will come to a successful conclusion. The Program is
sponsored through a Librarians for the 21st Century grant,
awarded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, written
and
administered by Georgetown University's Lauinger Library. Launched
in 2003, the Program was designed to provide a mentoring, education
and experiential opportunity for library school students rom
traditionally underserved ethnic or racial groups who have demonstrated
an interest in academic research libraries. After two to three
years of both studying library and information science and applying
their learning to positions within the CIRLA libraries, nine
of our protegees will now become nine professional colleagues
with a capstone experience of the program: a one-year professional
position in one of the world's most celebrated libraries, The
Library of Congress.
Poster detail, showing program participants, from
the poster session presented by CIRLA Fellows at this
year's
American Library Association annual conference, entitled
"The CIRLA Fellowship: A Recruitment Model for Promoting
Diversity in Leadership."
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Georgetown wrote the grant proposal for three major reasons,
all reflected in national research and U.S. employment data.
First, while American colleges and universities expect a larger
proportion of the their future students to be drawn from racial
and ethnic minorities, few faculty and professionals on campuses
reflect the diversity of their anticipated student cohort. (Within
the CIRLA academic libraries, under 8% of our professionals
are from diverse backgrounds, a particularly surprising number
given
that one of our institutions is a Historically Black University.)
Second, First Lady Laura Bush, herself a librarian, recognized
that the average age of our profession was older than most
others and that impending retirements of our "graying" colleagues
outnumbered
library science graduates. Thus she launched the "Librarians
for the 21st Century Program" to attract more young people
to the profession. Third, those retiring had developed deep
and
rich expertise in a diverse number of functional areas within
research libraries, but not many library school graduates were
prepared in those areas. It would take new initiatives and
different approaches to retain the specialties that research
libraries
must sustain, even as we sought expertise in emerging areas
from a younger generation of recruits. Prominent examples at Georgetown support that third point. Recently,
for instance, one of our language specialists retired, taking
with her our expertise in three East Asian languages. We have
successfully recruited for this position, but only by a complex
combination of strategies. Libraries need to develop new plans
to replace such people, but we can't do so without an adequate
supply of new librarians whose expertise we will need to develop.
On the other hand, younger recruits who have lived with advanced
technology for most of their lives will be assets to research
libraries in supporting the needs of faculty, students and researchers
in dramatically different ways. The digital environment promises
much but demands expertise we do not always maintain.
The CIRLA Fellows have gained mentoring and training in a variety
of "core" research library areas, but have also worked in specialty
areas that are as diverse as their interests. This program brough
a new generation of librarians to the library, inspried the mentors
who worked with our protegees, supplied training and expertise
to the areas that research libraries need, and provided a model
for strategic recruitment and professional development for the
future. We celebrate the conclusion of the program even as we
anticipate the possibilities to come from our experience. We
congratulate the nine Fellows, below, for their service to us,
but most importantly for their new placements at the Library
of Congress. The CIRLA Fellows assure research librarianship
a grand example of diversity in every sense of the word, and
we are all enriched because of it.
The Fellows receiving one-year professional positions at the
Library of Congress are:
Jade Alburo, Fellow at Smithsonian Institution. Reference and
Collection Processing Librarian.
Netta Cox, Fellow at Smithsonian Institution. Acquisitions Specialist
Librarian, Anglo-American Acquisitions Division.
Jovanna Frazier, Fellow at Georgetown University. Network System
Research Assistant Librarian.
Alliah Humber, Fellow at Howard University. Reference Librarian,
Serial and Government Publications Division.
Julius Jefferson, Jr., Fellow at Howard University. Reference
Librarian, Humanities and Social Sciences Division.
Hector Morey, Fellow at Library of Congress. Acquisitions Specialist
Librarian, European and Latin American Acquisitions Division.
Zhongie Sun, Fellow at Howard University. Librarian (Chinese),
Asian Division.
Amber Thiele, Fellow at Smithsonian Institution. Music Specialist
Librarian.
Matthew Treskon, Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Cataloger
(Pictorial Collections), Prints and Photographs Division.
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