College and Research Libraries 50th Anniversary Feature- The Growth of the Profession Leigh Estabrook The article offers an account of the processes shaping the professionalization of college and re- search librarianship within the framework of four contemporary sociological theories. The au- thor suggests that structural changes within higher education and within the information industry affect the legitimacy, status, and territory of librarians' work. Growth of the profes- sion cannot be accomplished through the efforts of librarians alone. The profession is pressured by demands from the organizations in which the library operates, the changing nature of pro- fessional work, and competition from others to gain control of some areas of information work. his article offers an account of the processes shaping the pro- fessionalization of college and research librarianship. It does not address the question of whether aca- demic librarianship is or will become a profession. Nor does it offer a history of college and research librarianship. In- stead, it examines the arenas in which aca- demic librarians struggle-the academic community and the wider information society-and the ways in which librarians strive to shape that environment to achieve professional growth. The article presents an interpretation of the dynamics of growth of the profession of college and research librarianship within the frame- work of contemporary sociological re- search on professions. Occupational groups do not become professions simply by deciding and as- serting that they are so, nor by some natu- rally occurring set of events. Those occu- pations that are regarded as professions achieve that recognition as a result of on- going struggles to achieve control over their work, to control the external markets in which their services are delivered, and to achieve social and political status. The medical profession provides painful illus- trations of ways in which professional au- thority is fought for and maintained. Re- cent examples include lobbying and legislation regarding the rights of nurse- midwives and physicians' arguments with health maintenance organizations over autonomy in ordering medical proce- dures. The struggle for power is ongoing because the environment in which profes- sionals practice changes constantly: new professional groups emerge, new technol- ogies are invented, and the political envi- ronment shifts. Similarly, the growth of college and re- search librarianship as a profession has in- volved a complex process of actions taken by librarians, shifts in roles and relations of librarians to others in their academic communities, and actions and ·demands by external bodies. When librarians speak of growth, they are concerned less with the question of how many librarians prac- tice than with the question of "to what ef- fect." Growth is understood to encom- pass increased status, increased auton- omy, and increased control within the Leigh Estabrook is Dean of the Graduate School of Library anti Information Science, University of Illinois , Urbana, Illinois 61801. Special thanks are owed my research assistant Fred Gilmore, a master's student in GSLIS, and my husband, Carl Estabrook, inveterate and uncomplaining editor. 287 288 College & Research Libraries workplace and within society. ~~ other words, growth includes recogmtion by others of the value of the profession and the opportunity to practice in ways th~t professionals believe to be most appropri- ate. ... THE SOCIOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK Several recent sociological studies sug- gest ways of approaching the growth of professions and their struggle for control. Although these monographs give greatest attention to the medical and legal profes- sions, their theoretical analyses provide important insights for the analysis of aca- demic librarian ship. In this thoughtful study Professions and Power, 1 Terrence Johnson demonstrates the limits of those theories of professional- ization that treat all occupational groups similarly and rank them according to the number of "professional traits" that they can claim or that they are in the process of obtaining. Johnson argues that profes- sions vary widely according to the arenas in which they operate. He suggests that variations in power groupings within the profession, professional-client relation- ships, and the "levels of professionaliza- tion" of different occupational groups can only be explained by accounting ''for vari- ations in the institutional framework of professional practice. " 2 • • Eliot Freidson, who previously studted the ways in which physicians achieve au- tonomy and dominance, has rece~tly turned to the examination of the relation- . ship between knowledge a~d professional power. In his book, Professwnal Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge, he distinguishes between a profession's formal body of knowl~dge, which is developed through baste re- search and taught within academic insti- tutions, and the "working knowledge" that is employed by practitioners. 3 When professionals work in institutions, profes- sional knowledge is transformed by the exigencies of the work environme~t .. Pro- fessionals are influenced by admimstra- tive rules, the power of some clients, lim- ited resources, and the like. Freidson says, My basic thesis is that the actual substance of May 1989 the knowledge that is ultimately involved in in- fluencing human activities is different from the formal knowledge that is asserted by academics and other authorities whose words are pre- served in the dO'cuments that are so frequently relied on. 4 Magali Larson's 1977. w?~k, The R~se of Professionalism, has a stgniftcantly differ- ent thesis: "professionalism [is] ... an at- tempt to translate one order of s~arce resources-special knowledge and skills- into another-social and economic re- wards. " 5 The characteristics of profes- sions, such as formal training, .credential- fig, professional association, co~es ?~ eth- ics, and work autonomy, are stgniftcant because they contribute to and legitimate an occupation's claim to higher social sta- tus, and thereby to its ability to gain con- trol over markets for its services. Building on these theories but con- sciously diverging from them, Andrew Abbott in The System of Professions6 ad- dresses the limits of the concept of ''pro- fessionalization" as presented by Freid- son and Larson. He argues that it is useless to look at any one occupational group in isolation: professional groups develop interdependently. Furthermore, one must examine the connection be- tween a profession and its work ("juris- diction" in Abbot's terms)-and not merely the structure of the profession-if one wishes to reach an understanding of the growth of a profession. In a ser~es of case studies, including one on the infor- mation professions, Abbot offers an alter- native theory: Each profession is bound to a set of tasks by ties of jurisdiction, the strengths and weaknesses of these ties being established in the process of ac- tual professional work. Since none of t~ese links is absolute or permanent, the professions make up an interacting system, an ecology. Professions compete within this system, and a profession's success reflects as much the situa- tions of its competitors and the system struc- ture as it does the profession's own efforts. 7 In summary, these authors suggest that an understanding of the growth of college and research librarianship may be aided by examining (1) the e~ternal en.viron- ment within which librarians practice; (2) working knowledge employed in practice; (3) strategies used to increase professional status; and (4) the jurisdictions within which college and research libraries oper- ate. THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT The pages of fifty years of College & Re- search Libraries provide a constant reflec- tion of academic librarians' awareness of the environment within which they work. One could easily track the changing con- cerns of higher education by noting themes within the journal, e.g., the li- brary's contribution to the war effort, the library's contribution to undergraduate education, and the library's contribution to the research community. Those issues of concern for the library range from changes within the higher education com- munity to political and economic changes in society at large. The growth of the pro- fession is not immune to any of these forces. Arthur McAnally and Robert Downs called attention to many of the issues still critical to the internal academic commu- nity: information explosion, curricular de- mands generated by increasing interdisci- plinary work, reductions in budget, and technological change. 8 These forces con- tinue to challenge the profession; but they are now combined with rapid structural changes within the university driven by dramatic increases in capital and operat- ing expenditures needed to support infor- mation technologies, research equipment, and personnel, and equally significant transformations in scholarly communica- tion and information transfer facilitated by new technologies. Issues raised by McAn- nally and Downs remain for the profes- sion but are compounded by these eco- nomic and technological forces. Administrative Changes The changing economic structure has led to closer administrative scrutiny of those facilities and services funded as un- assessed overhead, e.g., the university li- brary. In many institutions, units such as the publications office, the office of tele- communications, and even the develop- ment office now provide services only to Growth of the Profession 289 those departments that can afford to pur- chase them. Departments that once pro- vided free services to other units as a pub- lic good now charge for those services. At the same time, most academic institutions are increasingly aggressive in examining ways to reallocate resources, as well as in seeking external sources of revenue from such sources as alumni or corporate part- ners. Libraries have experienced fully these economic and technological changes as they ~ave coped with increasing costs of materials and technology. Capital invest- ments displace persoimellines; cataloging networks displace much on-site original cataloging and the type of staff perform- ing it. The impact on professional staff ap- pears to be profound. Ruth Hafter' s study of cataloging professionals, library assis- tants, and administrators led her to con- clude that ''increased reliance in networks creates a trend toward the deprofessiona- lization of cataloging. Control over the or- ganization and scheduling of work is shown to be shifting from cataloging de- partments to administrators. " 9 She also found that work is being restrucfured to allow a lower level of personnel to per- form tasks previously assigned to profes- sionals. A current study of this author supports these findings and suggests that similar patterns are evident in public ser- • 10 VICeS. The profession is changing not only in its internal structure, but also in its rela- tionships to its institutional base and its clients. Within the university, deans and directors of libraries are subject to the same shift in role that is being experienced by other academic administrators. In addi- tion to being scholars, they are expected to have external visibility; entrepreneurial skills; and the ability to deal effectively with constituents and to raise funds from grants, contracts, and gifts. Although these political skills are possessed by a number of professional librarians, other academic administrators do not always as- sociate these talents with the library pro- fession. Search committees for academic librarians point to the success and visibil- ity of people like V artan Gregorian and James Billington and more readily look to 290 College & Research Libraries individuals outside librarianship to fill currently open dean- and directorships. Whether it is because individuals outside the profession are thought to appear more sophisticated when dealing with the rich and famous or whether librarians are not credited with being aggressive enough for the current academic arena, a battle about the importance of professional education for professional positions, thought to have been won several decades ago, has reemerged as the nature of the work has changed. ''The changing political and eco- nomic climate of higher education has obvious implications for libra- rian/ client relations and conse- quently for the growth of the profes- sion.'' Shifting Client Relationships The changing political and economic cli- mate of higher education has obvious im- plications for librarian/client relations and consequently for the growth of the profes- sion. So, too, does the changing techno- 'logical environment in which universities carry out their work. As libraries seek solutions to the prob- lem of how to fund expensive information systems, new power relationships with external clients have developed. The capi- tal investment in an online catalog and the labor costs incurred in adapting a library's records result in significant dependence on the performance of vendors. Poor sys- tems cannot be junked with the ease one might have discarded poorly constructed wood catalog drawers. Moreover, com- puter systems adopted by libraries may need to be integrated with systems from other libraries, with a university account- ing system, with the computing center's operations, or with other institutional or external technologies. When this occurs, the library's operations become increas- ingly bound up with the operations of campus and/or state systems. At the same time, professional staff develop a new May 1989 form of dependency on vendors and the institution. Choices must be made that satisfy these external bodies. When differ- ences of opinion occur, factors beyond professional judgment affect decisions. The new information technologies em- ployed by libraries are also changing pro- fessional relationships with users. Online public access catalogs and remote access to bibliographic and textual information distance the particular library from its lo- cal clientele. If the OPAC provides data for many libraries, the limitations of the local library's collection become less critical. When users gain access to information re- sources through remote systems, their re- lationships with library professionals and with the physical collection begin to change. These developments may en- hance clients' regard for academic librari- ans if (1) users recognize the complexities of retrieving information from these new systems and (2) librarians' professional expertise is employed in systems develop- ment. It is equally likely that develop- ments to increase the quality of end-user searching may reduce use (and therefore the perceived value) of the professional in- termediary. Freidson notes the importance of client control to the growth and status of a pro- fession. Professionals who can determine the course of treatment, or even whether one should be treated at all, wield im- mense power. That power is consciously given over by the client; and as that is done, the client effectively recognizes the authority of the professional. It could be easily argued that new information tech- nologies have given librarians more op- portunity for control of their clients be- cause new systems require greater expertise in design and implementation, but it is not necessarily evident to a user of such systems the extent to which librari- ans' expertise and control is affecting their use. The Extra-university Environment Academic libraries have always been af- fected by changes in the publishing indus- try, in the copyright law, and in the poli- cies of the suppliers of such goods as library furniture. In recent years the eco- nomic and legal systems have assumed even greater importance in library opera- tions due to the shifts in ways in which in- formation is stored and retrieved. Gov- ernment decisions about copyright, about · telecommunications regulation and tariff rates, and about ways in which data will be collected and disseminated are having a significant impact on user services. Such decisions affect more than the cost of and means of access to certain materials. They are influencing the form of publication and even what government information is disseminated in a nonproprietary fashion. The professional voice in these decisions is muffled by the government's concern for profit over access. The level of profes- sional control and influence over signifi- cant policy matters has been diminished. Professionals also struggle in their rela- tionship to the private sector, particularly with vendors from whom they purchase equipment. The mutual dependence of li- brarians and suppliers of books, materi- als, and supplies is long-standing; but the capital required for an automated system (and the ongoing expense of mafutaining it) significantly changes the relationship between buyer and seller. First, the pro- fessional expertise of library staff only par- tially determines a final decision. Univer- sity decisions about technology, demands from consortia with which the library co- operates, and the amount of money avail- able for purchasing the system are among the factors that limit the professional deci- sion. Second, when a vendor sells a sys- tem to a library, the relationship does not end. Installation, maintenance, system support, and development of enhance- ments are expected from the vendor. Third, one sale to one institution can rep- resent several months' profit for a small systems developer. Alternatively, some li- brary purchases that may represent a sig- nificant investment for the library may be trivial for the vendor. In the current environment, . the rela- tionship between librarians and vendors is complex-sometimes hostile and some- times collaborative. 11 The ability of profes- sionals to articulate their needs and to ex- ert professional control will be more a function of the money the library is able to spend than of the strength of the argu- ment. Library professionals are weakened Growth of the Profession 291 in their individual roles but achieve strength in community. As Susan Baerg Epstein notes, "The library community is unique in the degree of communication among its members. One library tells an- other library-everything. A vendor can- not work in this field without acknowl- edging and respecting this professional interaction.' ' 12 LEGITIMACY: WORKING KNOWLEDGE VS. PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE Within this institutional framework, ac- ademic librarians are challenged to main- tain their intellectual claim for legitimacy as professionals. A recent book by Michael Winter13 seeks to identify the characteris- tics of librarianship as a profession. Begin- ning with the assertion that "profession- alization . . . is rooted in the much larger development of the growth of occupa- tional expertise and the use of human ser- vice, " 14 the author defines that expertise by saying it is "the maintenance of culture through maintenance of access to knowl- edge records ... that legitimates that au- thority of librarianship as an occupa- tion. " 15 Few would argue about the validity of this assertion. An understand- ing of collection, preservation, organiza- tion, and dissemination of information in the service of maintaining access to ~ knowledge records [information] pro- vides the knowledge base of the library profession. But the changes occurring from without the profession-and even on its behalf-raise questions about how pro- fessional expertise is employed. Demands on the ·director for entrepre- neurial skills place that individual in the service of the profession; but the expertise that she or he employs is rarely the exper- tise of the professional librarian. Friedson notes this phenomenon in all professions: Some administrative and managerial positions are mandated to members of professions and must be classified as professions. They are a function of professions' efforts to preserve their control by using their own members to mediate between practitioners and the surrounding so- cial environment. " 16 Those librarians who do hold responsi- bility to employ professional knowledge 292 College & Research Libraries in such positions as collection managers or original catalogers also are limited in how they use that knowledge. They are limited in their authority to allocate resources, and they are limited by the use of profes- sional expertise from outside the library. Friedson makes a critical distinction about the nature of professional autonomy: Professional employees possess technical au- tonomy or the right to use discretion and judg- ment in the performance of their work. . . . Furthermore, within certain limits, they must be able to select the work they do and decide how to do it. The limits, however, are set by management's resource allocation decisions. In the former sense they are autonomous, pos- sessing a distinct measure of freedom and inde- pendence on the job that conventional workers lack .... In the latter sense, however, they are helpless and dependent because they have no control over the ''economy'' of the organiza- tion that employs them. 17 To the extent that responsibility for ob- taining resources and for allocating them is removed from those making profes- sional decisions, the professional role is limited. Within individual libraries the profes- sional role is increasingly limited by what might be called the migration of expertise. Changes in cataloging practice provide the best example of this. The increasing pro- portion of cataloging done by professionals from other libraries may increase the level of expertise required by a few catalogers in any one library, but the important relation- ship to users has shifted. When cataloging was done in-house, there was the possibil- ity of a strong connection between the pro- fessional and the user. Understanding of the needs of the user and the library's unique collection was part of professional expertise. Not only are there fewer of those professional experts in any one library now, but there is also the loss of that expert connection between user, collection, and professional knowledge about biblio- graphic control. The level of expertise re- quired by any one cataloger may now be greater, but it is employed in a different context and there are recent suggestions that this migration is leading to a lowering of professional standards. 18 Legitimacy of a profession is also depen- May 1989 dent on the relationship between the aca- demic institutions that educate profes- sionals and the professionals who practice (and who may also conduct research). The academic knowledge system provides le- gitimation, research, and instruction as well as new treatments, diagnoses, and inferences for practitioners. In doing so it helps shape professional work and the ter- ritory in which the profession operates. The critical issue for the growth, and even survival, of a profession is to maintain a strong connection between academic knowledge and knowledge in practice. When the academic work in which a pro- fession is based becomes too distanced from the practitioners, it no longer serves the important legitimating function. (Some suggest that this is happening in the law.) When professionals in practice make deci- sions too far removed from the research base, their claim to professional status based on specialized knowledge can be challenged. (Some see evidence of this in contemporary psychotherapy.) As the con- duct of academic library work is changed by environmental conditions and new technologies, so, too, is the work within schools of library and information science. The ability of the academic library research community and practitioners to maintain strong links with one another will affect the legitimacy of the profession in the future. STATUS: STRATEGIES AND ENVIRONMENT The relative status of librarianship has been an ongoing concern of its members. Status-that intangible measure of respect accorded by society to an individual or group-is valued not only for reasons of self-esteem. Many librarians recognize that higher status in our capitalist, status- conscious society is a reflection of and can be used to enhance economic and political power. However much one might wish to dismiss existing rankings of occupational status because of disagreement with the values inherent in them, it is impossible to disentangle the issue of status from the is- sue of the growth of the profession. In our society the status of a profession is linked to the tasks it performs, the status of the institutions with which it is con- nected, and the status of the clients it serves. The tasks of college and research librarianship have become increasingly valued since World War II with the discov- ery of the value of information and the growth of research institutions. 19 More re- cently, recognition by major corporations of the value of managing information has helped raise the status of all those who can connect their work with information man- agement. At the same time, academic li- brarians have not always been the benefi- ciaries of this new perspective. The unresolved debate about faculty status for librarians, driven in part by the persistent belief of many teaching/research faculty that librarians are not full faculty, re- mains. 20 As vendors push end-user searching and universities deliver infor- mation services through individual de- partments and the computer center, the relationship between the library and infor- mation delivery may be even less clear to library users. It is not sufficient for the tasks to be more valued; the tasks must also be associated with the particular pro- fession. It is not surprising, therefore, that a major issue for academic librarians re- cently has been to assert the importance of the information intermediary and biblio- graphic instruction and more particularly, on some campuses, to work to be linked to the position of information ''czar.'' Within the profession at large, the dif- ferentiation of librarians by the type of in- stitution in which they work has benefited college and research librarians due to the higher status accorded by society to aca- demic institutions and faculty. Measures of perception of the relative status of types of library repeatedly rank academic librari- anship above school and public librarian- ship. Service to higher-status clients is as- sociated with higher professional status. Academic librarians themselves have contributed to this process in various ways, such as (1) differentiating the higher-status institutions from others through development of the Association for Research Libraries; (2) differentiating college and research librarianship from other library professionals by holding sep- arate ACRL meetings; and (3) seeking higher-status benefactors for the library Growth of the Profession 293 through corporate partnerships, individ- ual giving, and friends groups. While it would be inaccurate to say that the pro- cess of differentiation between types of li- brarians and types of libraries has been carried out for reasons of professional growth, it is nonetheless true that that process benefits certain segments of the college and research library profession. While increased status may help librari- ans gain added resources for their institu- tions, the factors that relate to that in- creased status may work against the profession in other ways. For example, higher professional status is related to greater control over clients, but higher- status clients may be less likely to give over authority to professional experts. A librarian working at Harvard may have high status within the library profession but have relatively limited scope for pro- fessional work within an institution in which the users think they are the experts in information seeking. And just as librari- ans work to increase their status by relat- ing their work to the information age, so too do other workers within the academic environment. THE PROFESSION'S JURISDICTION The growth of the profession must be re- lated to the scope of its work and to the ter- ritory in which that work is carried out; yet this is not easily done. The structure and scope of work are changing and shifting among different professions. The territo- rial boundaries are becoming blurred, leading to increasing possibilities of bor- der dispute. Questions about jurisdictions are raised within the profession itself, be- tween units within the college or univer- sity in which librarians work, and even between the library and outside organiza- tions. Some of the changes in professional work have already been noted in the pre- vious section on professional knowledge, but there are other aspects to these changes. Academic librarians readily ad- mit that tasks previously performed by paraprofessionals are now being carried out by student workers. Professional jobs are being done by paraprofessionals and . 294 College & Research Libraries the nature of professional work is chang- ing. Such changes raise questions about not only the knowledge base anchoring the profession but also the jurisdiction of professional workers. Abbott notes that there is always over- lay in tasks performed between categories of workers. Nurses may determine appro- priate medication. Executives may type their own letters. Paralegals may do most of the research on a case. But to say that the phenomenon of overlapping job per- formance is common to all professions does not dismiss it as an issue for the growth of college and research librarian- ship. Prior to installation of computerized systems in libraries, there was relative clarity about what was and was not pro- fessional work. Cataloging and reference were, for example, clearly the domain of professionals. That is no longer true for the profession as a whole. My current research, for example, reveals significantly different institutional patterns about the work of professionals. In some academic libraries, reference is reserved solely for profession- als. In others a decision has been made to staff reference with paraprofessionals. Increasingly, libraries need to hire pro- fessional workers who are not librarians. These include systems analysts, develop- ment officers, and human resource man- agers: people with professional expertise vital to the library's growth but not neces- sarily related to the knowledge base of the profession. This situation raises different questions about professional domain. Questions about jurisdiction within the wider educational community can be illus- trated by asking questions such as, "Where will1990 census materials reside and who will be the intermediary for us- ers?'' When academic librarians are asked this question, a variety of answers are of- fered. In some institutions the sociology department or statistical services unit will provide access to the data and assistance in interpretation. In some the computer services office will house the data, but other units, including the library, will be responsible for user assistance. The variety of answers suggests several things. First, libraries do not have a well- recognized claim to providing access to all May 1989 types of iruormation regardless of form. And second, the ways in which new fof:: mats of information are handled are parti- ally determined by institutional history and the relative strength of different cam- pus units. The academic library's role in providing access to new forms of information is also a function of power and politics. Those same economic forces within higher edu- cation that are changing the professional role of library director lead to competition among individual campus units for money, prestige, and visibility. When IBM promoted access to DIALOG to the University of Illinois' division of adminis- trative computirig, the computer services office, and the library, each unit demon- strated interest. While libraries seek to provide coherent access to information regardless of form, computer centers seek new territory to compensate for the demise of mainframe computing and shifting patterns of use. The mergers of library and computing centers are seen as a logical way to address the problem of boundaries. Few organiza- tions, however, have successfully carried out a merger. In fact, mergers raise new is- .;ucs about the professional role of the li- brarian.21 Finally, intrauniversity questions about jurisdiction are compounded by the en- croachment of information services from organizations outside the academic com- munity. Faculty and students who sub- scribe directly to BRS or DIALOG or who are able to gain access to other academic li- braries through an online catalog no longer have the same professional rela- tionship to their home institution. It is not simply that library users seek out altern.:t- tive suppliers. The publishers of Chemical Abstracts and other similar organizations aggressively seek out new markets and in- tentionally compete with professionals within the academic setting. At present both competition and conflict characterize relationships between aca- demic librarians and others who wish to deliver information services to members of the academic community. As new forms of information technology create openings for academic librari.ans, there are opportunities for significant profes- sional growth. At the same time profes- sionals in other academic units are exploit- ing ways in which information technolo- gies can be used to enhance their own growth. Differences in the resolutions to these territorial disputes among institu- tions of higher education will depend on how they decide to structure relationships between potentially competing units. Implications This discussion suggests that growth of college and research librarianship is not entirely within the control of its members. Moreover, because adequate resources are critical for the delivery of high-quality library services and because the political and economic models that shape resource allocation within our society and within our institutions are capitalist models, the library profession is in a profoundly diffi- cult position. To continue to grow as a pro- fession necessitates continued, and prob- ably increased, involvement in competi- tion for status and territory. If librarians do not compete, other groups will look for ways they can increase their own status and territory through involvement in li- brary and information services. Not to compete, or not consciously to seek growth, may lead to a profound loss of even basic library services. The cost of growth may be high because it may mean casting off certain services, certain types of clients, certain standards of practice, and even certain of our col- leagues. There are pressures to violate the ethical principles of equality of service that underly the profession. If librarians be- come dependent on individuals and orga- nizations with money to support services, there are incentives to skew services to those with greater resources. As noted above, the cost of increasing status may be separation from lower-status groups, even within the profession. The cost of in- creasing the academic library's market share may entail entering directly into competition with alternative providers. Although these are possible conse- quences, it is important to recognize that the profession need not violate its funda- mental principles as it strives for growth. Growth of the Profession 295 Strategies of integrity adopted in the past continue to help the profession grow. These include the work of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the growth of other organizations such as ARL, and the formation of various user groups. One of College & Research Libraries origi- nal goals was to promote professional growth. In the first editorial it was as- serted that C&RL was established to pro- vide a professional voice, which would "help to develop the ACRL into a strong and mature organization. " 22 The journal provides, among other things, a means for consolidating the opinions of academic li- brarians, for building a knowledge base for the field, and for informing those out- side of the scope and status of the profes- sion. College and research librarians also ex- ert professional control through their in- volvement in the legislative process, al- though they have been criticized for not being as active as they should. Harold Shills notes that: Impressive though the overall growth in Legis- lative Day involvement may be, academic li- brarians still comprise only 7 percent of the total number of persons participating in 1987. Given ACRL' s status as the largest division of ALA, the large number of national issues affecting ac- ademic libraries, and the high stakes involved in those issues, the level of Legislative Day par- ticipation by academic librarians has been un- desirably low. 23 The type of education provided profe-s- sionals continues to be critical to profes- sional growth. In 1958 Paul Wasserman espoused the value and importance of teaching library administration. 24 Today it could be argued that there is equal value in teaching administration of higher educa- tion, with an emphasis on such factors as environmental scanning, strategic plan- ning, and marketing of services. The edu- cational system also provides a critical gateway as it admits individuals to profes- sional programs and socializes them into the expectations of the profession. Abbott concludes his discussion of the information professions by asking about the current structure of professionalism for information workers, a category he 296 College & Research Libraries construes broadly. He suggests, All the professions in the information area will follow the prior example of statistics, market re- search, and computing itself. They will end up as small, elite professions with intellectual ju- risdictions over large areas. In these areas they will oversee commodified professional knowl- edge executed by paraprofessionals, serving the elite clients directly themselves. 25 Such a conclusion seems premature. The growth of the profession depends on many factors beyond the control of its members, but that is true for all profes- May 1989 sions, not just college and research librari- anship. The changes in the economic structure of colleges and universities and the revolution in information technologies clearly drive many broader changes that affect this profession, but the future is not scripted. The growth of the profession will also be shaped by members themselves, both individuals acting alone within their local institutions and, more importantly, individuals acting in concert as a profes- sion to achieve the goal of providing effec- tive access to information for all users. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. Terrence Johnson, Professions and Power (London: MacMillan, 1972). 2. Ibid., p.90. 3. Eliot Freidson, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1986). 4. Ibid, p.xi. 5. Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Pr., 1977) p.xvii. 6. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1988). 7. Ibid., p.33. 8. Arthur M. McAnally and Robert B. Downs, "The Changing Role of Directors of University Li- braries," College & Research Libraries, 34, no.2:103-25 (March 1973). 9. Ruth Hafter, Academic Librarians and Cataloging Networks: Visibility, Quality Control, and Professional Status (New York: Greenwood, 1986), p.125. 10. Leigh Estabrook, "The Effect of Technology on the Library Labor Force" (forthcoming). 11. Ellen Hoffmann, "Library-Vendor Relations: An Era of New Challenges," Canadian Library Journal 44:89-92 (April1987). 12. Susan Baerg Epstein, in "Automating Libraries: The Major Mistakes Vendors Are Likely to Make," Library Hi Tech 3, no.2:107-13 (1985). 13. Michael F. Winter, The Culture and Control of Expertise (New York: Greenwood, 1988). 14. Ibid., p.32-33. 15. Ibid., p.77. 16. Freidson, p .49. 17. Ibid., p.155. 18. For evidence of this see Hafter and Estabrook. 19. Barbara E. Markuson, "Bibliographic Systems, 1945-76," in "American Library History: 1876-1976," Library Trends 25:1 (1976). 20. Patricia Knapp, "The College Librarian: Sociology of a Professional Specialization," College & Re- search Libraries, 16, no.1:66-72 (January 1955). It is striking how relevant Knapp's 1955 article re- mains today. 21. ACRL Task Force on Libraries and Computer Centers, "Libraries and Computer Centers" College & Research Libraries News 48, no.8:443-47 (September 1987). 22. "Introducing 'College & Research Libraries,' " College & Research Libraries, 1, no.1:9 (Dec. 1939). 23. Harold B. Shill, "Influencing the Information Environment," College & Research Libraries News, 49, no.1:19-21 (Jan. 1988). 24. Paul Wasserman, "Development of Administration in Library Service: Current Status and Future Prospects," College & Research Libraries 19, no.4:283-94 (July 1958). 25. Abbott, p.246.