Professional Achievement
Librarianship’s technological transformation has not been an unmixed blessing.
One untoward consequence has been that some supervisors who entered the
profession under a different dispensation are insufficiently familiar with new
technology. “Those that entered the field who are not able to retrain to use
technology do not have the skills to do the basic jobs in some cases,” one WILIS1
respondent complained. To another, it seemed that “More responsibility goes to
older employees with less skills or abilities.” This makes sense to some extent. In a
profession as changed by technology as LIS has been, one would expect that
employees who had been in the field long enough to ascend to management would
not necessarily have to skills of a freshly minted MLS. And a certain amount of this
difference between skills of managers and lower-level employees is necessary—
they perform different jobs, after all, and it would hardly be a sign of a healthily
functioning organization for a large library director to be generating cataloging
records or updating the library website. But from a strict traditional craft perspective,
a too-great variance between the skills of those higher and lower in an
organizational hierarchy is problematic to the extent that part of the boss’s job is