Introduction.  Individuals arrive at our school to commence their studies in library and information sciences from different backgrounds and with varying expectations and preconceptions.  Sometimes, faculty members find it challenging to design and deliver courses amidst the cacophony of student’s personal interests and agendas.  Despite this, students, with the help of faculty mentors, will recognize and discover common themes across their courses and from a variety of instructors.

I am often asked by students preparing to come into my own specialization, archives and records management, what they should read before they start classes.  While I usually tell them to rest before they embark on a strenuous year of graduate study, I often recommend a book or two or refer them to the syllabus from a previous year as a means of picking what they might want to read before they matriculate.  What I have often wanted to do is to suggest a small cluster of books that they should read to get a sense of the kinds of issues they will be considering here in the MLIS program.

It seems like a good idea, as I become LIS Program Chair, to go out on a limb and suggest ten books that every MLIS student ought to read.  Now, there won’t be a quiz at the orientation sessions at the beginning of the new academic year, so there is no need to worry too much about these recommendations.  Nor have I consulted with other SIS or LIS faculty to try to reach consensus about this reading list; I am sure there would be lots of disagreements about my choices.  And the books I have selected are ones with a broader appeal to the general reader, rather than more narrowly written textbooks students might encounter in their courses.  My aim is to provide a reading list that will touch upon themes and issues MLIS students will certainly grapple with during their studies here.  And, every choice I have made could be supplemented or even replaced by another book on the same topic; students might come to the School prepared to argue with my choices (and I look forward to the debate).

Book 1: The Importance of Libraries.  Some students opt to pursue an MLIS degree because they have experienced joy in visiting and using a library.  Matthew Battles, a librarian at Harvard, gives a sense of why libraries are important and their mystique in his Libraries: An Unquiet History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).  The author focuses on famous libraries, such as the Vatican Library, and famous library founders and supporters, such as Antonio Panizzi, who transformed the British Museum into one of the greatest libraries in the world.  Battles also recounts significant breakthroughs in librarianship, such as the development of the library catalog.  Libraries is a popularly-written history that provides a sense of why books, libraries, and librarians are essential to human history and, because of their importance, why they often are targets in war, genocide, and political movements.  Battles reflects on the meaning of the book burnings by the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi over two thousand years ago and those of Serb nationalist Nikola Koljevic less than two decades ago.  This is a book that can assist MLIS students, when they are immersed in course projects and reading, to remember why they wanted to pursue this career.

Book 2: The Joy of Reading.  As we review applications for the MLIS program, we don’t miss the fact that many prospective students are interested in coming to our school because they developed and nurtured a love of reading.  Given how much reading has been threatened by Web browsing and how students will be burdened with great quantities of required reading assignments, it is easy to lose sight of the pleasure of reading that may have prompted one to desire to work as a librarian or information professional.  Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1997) provides a personalized account of how reading has evolved through the centuries.  Manguel, an essayist, novelist, and translator, provides interesting anecdotes about reading, its importance, changing nature, and pleasures.  This is an entertaining book, beautifully illustrated, and worth perusing at any point when one feels burdened by reading overload.  Manguel inspires you to remember why reading is not just about acquiring information or nurturing knowledge, but that it is a sensual human activity.

Book 3: The Persistence of the Printed Book.  Many students associate libraries with books and books with why they became interested in becoming an information professional.  Yet, rumors, arguments, and even some research suggest that the printed book as we know it is about to disappear.  Before we create the impression that a year of study with us is about to crush your enthusiasm for the printed word, it would be good for new students to understand that there are countervailing arguments about the role and prospects for books.  Nicholas Basbanes’s A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004) is a love letter about the continuing utility of books even in the post-modern world of the World Wide Web.  Basbanes, a bibliophile who has written a series of works on book collecting and preserving, argues that there is, indeed, a future for books.  He roams across time and place to consider stories of individuals who have saved books, how various books have changed or influenced humanity’s knowledge and sense of itself, and why books deserve to be preserved as artifacts.  In a time when it seems that libraries want to discard books and replace them with digital surrogates, Basbanes provides some explanation for why the tactile, physical qualities of the printed word are important for both scholars and society.  Students who read this book will want to pull this volume back out, revisiting their annotations, when they spend a class session hearing about the wonders of digital text, networks, and the Web.

Book 4: Technology and the Document.  Library and information science programs have become obsessed with cramming as much information technology into the curriculum as they can, and for obvious and justifiable reasons.  Librarians and other information professionals build Web sites, digitize books, and preserve and maintain both digitally-born and digitized documents.  Regardless, students need to understand that technology does not drive everything and that information sources have always been associated with technologies of one sort or another.  Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1992) is an excellent lens by which to re-think the nature of information technology.  Petroski, an engineer by profession, examines in great detail the history of the pencil, including how it was designed, experiments to find the right materials, the pencil’s uses and their revolutionary recording characteristics, and its impact on organizations and society.  Anyone reading this book will never take any technology for granted again, or hold a pencil in the same way, or believe that any information technology will eradicate an older one.

Book 5: Information Revolutions.  For that matter, every new information technology is compared to earlier ones, and one historical transition (and interpretation) is consistently referenced.  Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) is constantly cited by every subsequent commentator on new and emerging information technologies.  Eisenstein makes broad and sweeping conclusions about how print promoted humanistic scholarship, the Reformation, science, and influenced every aspect of society from politics to education.  Scholars have been critiquing Eisenstein’s conclusions for more than a quarter-of-a-century, and popular commentators on technology and society have been reconsidering, misinterpreting, and exaggerating her ideas as well.  Students gain, by reading this long and often complicated work, an appreciation of how texts influence society and its citizens and how shifts in technology can bring paradigmatic change.

Book 6: Intellectual Property Wars.  The technology of mass duplication of texts also generated massive changes in intellectual property issues.  Where once upon a time people unthinkingly copied almost anything for nearly any purpose, now copyright and other intellectual property laws and policies have made such activities more complicated (just as we have entered an era when it is easier to copy or download everything from books to music).  Some of these changes have been seen as challenging what librarians and other information professionals do, although many information professionals themselves have seen opportunities and new possibilities for their own role in the face of intellectual property legal cases and controversies. Siva Vaidhynathan, in his aptly-titled The Anarchist In The Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2005), grapples with how the Internet has wrought considerable change on our social, political, economic, and cultural approach to the administration and use of information documents.  Considering a variety of cases, such as music file-sharing, Vaidhynathan explores how new information technologies cross political borders, challenge government, fractures old laws, transforms economic practices and expectations, and creates both chaos and opportunity.  This is a provocative book that ought to tip off library and information science students that while the traditional roles of information professionals may still exist, there are also new roles with exciting possibilities.  A reading of this book will generate lots of questions as one begins the MLIS program.

Book 7: Collecting and the Human Psyche.  Libraries and archives are the result of immense, sustained efforts in collecting.  Libraries and archives are not created overnight, but they result from energetic programs in identifying and then acquiring books, manuscripts, ephemera, and even artifacts, usually clustered about a theme, region, or constituent’s needs.  Collecting is one of humanity’s deepest and oldest traits, and students need to have a sense of what this represents.  One might even think of the World Wide Web as a collection of institutional, group, and personal documents.  Miles Harvey’s Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (New York: Broadway Books, 2001) reads like a novel, but it is really an analysis of collecting from multiple perspectives – the author himself, the thief, the map collectors, and the dealers in antiquities like maps.  The Island of Lost Maps is also an investigation into the challenges librarians, archivists, and curators face with providing security for their holdings.  This is a rich and entertaining book that will get students reflecting on themselves as collectors and on their institutions that by their collecting support societal memory.

Book 8: Organizing Stuff.  Everyone knows that librarians catalog books, that archivists prepare finding aids for their collections, and that other information professionals organize documents, perhaps by designing Web sites or by working on databases, for their employers.  There is both art and science to organizing or cataloguing information and the containers (whether real or virtual).  Henry Petroski’s Book on the Bookshelf  (New York: Vintage, 2000) provides a fascinating tale about the history of the engineering of bookshelves, with a special focus on the use of these devices for organizing books.  In fact, Petroski’s hilarious essay at the end of the book on fifty ways to organize one’s books (see if you can come up with fifty approaches to this before you look at it) provides an interesting glimpse into the many ways cataloguing can be done.  Petroski also provides a sobering assessment of library and information science education at the beginning of the book when he approaches librarians with the question of why books used to be chained to the shelves, gets no answer to his question, researches it on his own, and then wonders what library and information science schools are teaching.  And you might have noticed, I have included two books by one author, something I did not intend to do.  There is another value in reading his books; Petroski, an engineer by training, is a superb writer producing prose we all wish we could emulate.
 
Book 9: Going Back to School.  Many students in the MLIS program will be wondering why they are back in school or, having come right from undergraduate programs, why they are still in school.  There is great debate going on about the nature, status, condition, and purpose of higher education, and there is ample opportunity for wondering about the position of professional education in the university.  Many students come into this program wanting a credential, but we are committed to providing an education that lays a foundation for a professional career.  The university is under siege everywhere, but students might read Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) in order to embark on their next level of education.  Students will gain a sense of what the university has traditionally thought its role was in society, and MLIS students will especially enjoy Pelikan’s focus on the role of the university in preserving knowledge through their libraries and museums.  This is a straight, no nonsense description of what the university is about, and all students ought to understand the place where they will attend classes, complete assignments, and interact with faculty members.

Book 10: Heeding the Call.  It is easy for students, in the midst of an intensive graduate education program, to lose their way and forget just why it was they came to the school in the first place.  Such misgivings might occur because of how faculty members challenge them to rethink their preconceptions of what the information professions are about.  Sometimes, however, feelings of uncertainty occur because students really weren’t certain about what they wanted to do in the first place.  We are being told that Americans will change careers multiple times, and for some students this program might be a passage to a second, third, or fourth career.  Of course, education has a way of stimulating individuals to rethink what they are doing with their lives, and we hope that this is what happens here at our school. Nevertheless, students embarking on a career in the information professions ought to possess a sense of responding to a call, another way of saying that they should have developed reasons for coming into the MLIS degree program.  William Sullivan’s second edition of Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 2004) is a useful introduction to thinking about the nature of professions,” as Sullivan tracks the history of professions and what it means to be a professional.  Reading Work and Integrity won’t end students’ questions, but it will help them to understand better what they are doing in a professional school.

Conclusion.  Reading any or all of these books won’t answer every question or even provide the basis for a smooth transition into the MLIS program.  However, they will stimulate students to enter the program with many questions, expectations, and anticipation for what they will be studying and learning while here.  There are many books I could have suggested, and I am certainly open to hearing from students about books that have helped them in reflecting on a career in libraries, archives, and the information professions.  Happy reading!