Books and Other Endangered Species An Inquiry into the Values of Medical Librarianship* BY MARTHA JANE K. ZACHERT, D.L.S., Professor

College ofLibrarianship University ofSouth Carolina Columbia, South Carolina ABSTRACT

Major values of medical librarians, as exemplified in their periodical literature 1903-1977, are identified as "professionalism," "cooperation," "sense of community with health sciences practitioners," and "knowledge orientation." These values are examined in terms of interdisciplinary research into human values. Professionalism ig studied in greater depth in relation to criteria on a scale of professionalism. Medical librarians have been most concerned with the criteria of organization, specialized education (with more emphasis on continuing education than on introductory medical library education), and service orientation. Indication of challenge to long-held values exists in the contradictions among certain related assumptions underlying our selfimage, our current lack of standards, and changing societal views toward commitment to a single, life-long specialization. It is suggested that there is unexplored potential for support of our traditional values and the development of new ones by comparing them with the value systems of health scientists and educators of health sciences practitioners.

B EING invited to present a Janet Doe Lecture is an awesome experience (as each preceding lecturer has testified), the more so for me because I am currently a teacher rather than a health sciences library practitioner, and to some extent, therefore, I am removed from the "real world" of medical librarianship. Still, responsibility for preparing others to practice our profession is a real world of its own. It must be dealt with validly, or the real world of health sciences library practice will suffer. As a teacher I am convinced of the necessity for mindfulness of our philosophy in both teaching and practice. True, by far the greatest part of our time, in the classroom and in the library, is taken *The Janet Doe Lecture on the History or Philosophy of Medical Librarianship, presented June 12, 1978, at the Seventy-eighth Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association, Chicago, Illinois. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

up with facts. As individuals and as a group we hold certain beliefs, concepts, and attitudes that influence what we do with our facts, and perhaps more importantly, how we do it. So it seems essential to me to reexamine periodically this philosophical surround of our workaday world. If facts comprise what we frequently call our body of professional knowledge, then our beliefs, concepts, and attitudes comprise its essence. And it is one aspect of this essence that I undertook to study in preparation for this lecture-the identification of certain beliefs that are held in high esteem by us as a group, in other words, the valuebeliefs of medical librarianship. Value, as a concept, is under extensive study at the present time. It is being studied through empirical research in various disciplines of the social sciences, as well as through historical analysis and philosophical inquiry. The concept of worth attached to beliefs and the multiple nature of these esteemed beliefs hold significance for theories related to man's cognitive life and social actions, as well as to social and cultural institutions and the process of social change [1]. As a health sciences librarian and especially as a teacher of health sciences librarians, I want to know how such a ubiquitous influence is reflected by and in us. What values do health sciences librarians hold and what is the significance of these values for us? Various methodologies are available for such a study. A search for pervasive value-themes in the literature of medical librarianship, an historian's impressionistic analysis rather than a psychologist's rigorous content analysis, seemed most viable for me. I hope to interpret my findings in the critical spirit with which contemporary philosophers "ponder the knowable" [2]. To search out values in the documentation of medical librarianship, to ponder these values, perhaps to urge direction, seems to me to embody on our own plane one of the universal and age-old tasks of the philosopher. Once before I used this method to 381

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seek out the values of a professional group, and it proved useful, though only exploratory. My first study of values held by a group of librarians had been an in-depth one of a ten-year period [3]; this time I proposed to view the entire Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, plus one of its predecessor publications, substituting the broader span of the years 1903-1977 for the greatest depth of a single decade in the earlier study. To reread more than seventy-five volumes in their entirety seemed impractical, especially since I also proposed to study relevant parts of the empirical research on value in society. Therefore, I confined the medical library literature read to the Medical Library and Historical Journal, 1903-1907,* and every fourth year of the Bulletin of MLA, 1911-1977. This planned sample of twenty-eight volumes was supplemented by rereading of the Janet Doe Lectures (for they have tended to review significant themes) and with random dipping into many volumes not in the sample. It has proved impossible without rigorous research methodology to divorce my knowledge of what has been said in recent years by health sciences librarians, in and out of meetings, or to ignore what I know of group actions within MLA. So this study, which began with the literature, has been affected by various other influences. The result, I feel, is valid, though only exploratory and less a research study than a contemplative inquiry. THE NATURE OF VALUES What are values to the philosopher and why are

they studied? The outstanding contemporary theoretician in interdisciplinary study of value in society is the psychologist Milton Rokeach. His work, culminated in his 1973 book, The Nature of Human Values [4], synthesizes the empirical research of the last forty years. Rokeach has identified two distinctive ways in which the value concept has been used in society and studied by researchers [5]. One way is to describe people by values they hold, "values" meaning abstractions of characteristic "desirables" within their societies, such as freedom or equality. The second way is to describe the worth of objects in money or by some other index. One can give emphasis in *Made available to me for long-term study by the A. W. Calhoun Library of Emory University, for which I express my appreciation.

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study to the intangible or the tangible, so to speak. Currently, the research about values in society is more oriented to the description of values people hold than of the worth assigned to objects. It is this emphasis on values held by people that I proposed to follow in my study, that is, the emphasis on certain intangible, but highly esteemed, beliefs of health sciences librarians. Rokeach uses this definition: "A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence." Rokeach, and others, believes that the number of such values is smallish, and that the values held are related in a way that can be defined as a value system, "an enduring organization of beliefs ... along a continuum of relative importance"[6]. These definitions apply to values as attributes of individual persons, or as attributes of persons in groups. The groups may be heterogeneous, such as "society at large," and their values studied and described as "human values." Or persons may be arrayed into subgroups, limited in some homogeneous way, such as by sex, age, or occupation, and their "group values" studied accordingly. It is shown by Rokeach that values are enduring, but not inflexibly unchanging. They provide continuity to our lives and interactions, but they can and do change over a lifespan of an individual or a group [7]. The concept of a value system postulates that one's values are organized in such a way that some are more important than others. The resulting hierarchical structure, though a fairly stable force for continuity in the hubbub of life, nevertheless is capable of change. Indeed, change is defined in this view as a reordering of priorities in response to changes in culture, society, and personal experience [8]. To say that a value is a belief is to link the study of values with prior studies of beliefs and to allow the inquirer to draw on that body of knowledge for insight. Thus, we would accept the conclusion of research that "beliefs have cognitive, affective and behavioral components" [9]. The cognitive component of values as beliefs is knowledge of what is desirable, either as a state-of-being or as a mode of behavior. The affective component is the emotional attachment to the value, impelling us to favor or oppose it, to "approve of those who exhibit positive instances and disapprove of those who exhibit negative instances of it." And the behavioral component of values as beliefs is the element that leads to action [9]. We-as members of society or as members of a Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

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more limited group-become attached to our values by a process that begins with exposure to the values of others and identification with role models such as parent, sibling, mate, teacher, mentor. Confrontation with values different from our own has its place in the process, as does choice among values, at first subconscious, then tentatively conscious, strengthening through internalization, perhaps even ritualization, of the chosen beliefs. This process is cyclic rather than linear; there is sequence in it, and some phases have to be experienced before others become possible. Challenge to the existing value system occurs throughout life; and the ability to scrutinize one's values and to make modification or replacement choices is a mark of maturity [10]. Philosophers and other scholars have many reasons, abstract and practical, for their study of values. The rationale for a study of the values of health sciences librarianship is to me a practical one, stemming from the triple nature of beliefs: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Precisely because our values are held with strong emotional ties we will act on them, as research has documented that all social groups do. Action-decisions affecting our life as a group will be made within the meaning and limits of our values. Values are, in short, guides to action [11]. Indeed, another definition of value is "a belief upon which [one] acts by preference" [12]. To make explicit the nature of our values and to plot the intricacies of their relationships is to remove much of the happenstance quality of decisions and actions taken

naively. There are other compelling reasons to study values, of which I shall cite only two: the relationship of values fo the concept of self [B3] and the relationship of values to the process of change [14]. Self-concept is another kind of belief system, akin to values but even more central to the individual and, by extension, to the group (in this case, of health sciences librarians). I am, of course, referring to our "image." Though the image of the librarian has been discussed many times, it has rarely been objectively studied as self-image, never to my knowledge as the self-image of the medical librarian in comparison or contrast to the self-image of other subgroups within the total profession. Rokeach maintains that one function of values is to provide a comprehensive construct for the comparison of self and others. For health sciences librarians to do this would, I believe, prove insightful. The process of change in our society has also been subjected to considerable research, particuBull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

larly in recent years. Rokeach and numerous others have postulated that "the basic mechanism [of change] . . . is an affective state of self-dissatisfaction which is induced when a person becomes aware of certain contradictions within his total belief system" [14]. Again, I would apply this to health sciences librarians. It seems obvious to me that the more we know about our total belief system, of which values are such an important part, the better we will be able to spot the contradictions, to induce meaningful dissatisfactions-and to change. The long-term objective of study of the values of health sciences librarianship is to build a firm value system, one that is enduring but that can be changed rationally as we respond to change in our social and occupational environments. Thus in my preparatory reading I was seeking evidence of beliefs strongly held by health sciences librarians and used by us as the basis of group action. The beliefs might be explicitly identified, explored, and discussed in our literature, or they might be implicit in a variety of ways. They would have to do either with an end-state preferred by us or with a mode of conduct, a means by which to achieve the desired condition. These values that I expected to find would have to do with our work lives, rather than our personal lives. Of course the separation is not a dichotomy; interrelationships between occupational and personal values do exist and are important. My objective, however, relates to our values as an identifiable occupational group, beliefs that endure within the group as individuals come and go. Even though these beliefs must be enduring to be identified as values, I expected to find some changes in them over the years, perhaps only in the ways in which they have been implemented as group action. I was not concerned in this exploration with the why or the what of the challenges inevitably experienced by the values that have survived, even though it is through the challenges of society, technology, and personal belief systems that our surviving values have been shaped and our affective ties to them strengthened. Further, I felt fairly certain that I would not find an explicit synthesis of our values in the sense of an unambiguous delineation of a value system. VALUES OF HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARIANSHIP As expected, I found ample evidence of beliefs, some sufficiently enduring, strongly held, and used as the basis for group action that they may safely be called "group values." Also as expected,

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I found no delineation of a value system, a statement of priorities among our values. I will identify some of the values I found, but I will not plot a value system on the basis of exploratory study; therefore, there is no hierarchical implication in what I am saying. On the other hand, there is no doubt in my mind that the most pervasive value of medical librarians during most of the last century has been "professionalism." It has often been stated as a belief; it is strongly held and never openly contested as a desired end-state. Our perception of the term has been the guide for many of our group actions. I conclude that what we mean by professionalism is closely related to our self-image and that in some ways our meaning differs from that of other librarians, so that our self-image is somewhat different from that of other groups of librarians. I conclude further that our perception of the nature of professionalism is the determining factor in many of the changes taking place in health sciences librarianship at the present time. Professionalism is so vital to our value system that, following a brief identification of certain other values found in our literature, I shall return to it for further discussion. These other values, in no particular order, are "cooperation," "a sense of community with health sciences practitioners," and "knowledge orientation." They are not mutually exclusive from professionalism, nor from each other. Neither are these the only values of health sciences librarians. They are the ones perceived most clearly by me in the sample of evidence which I studied. Cooperation does not need definition or comment. Understanding of it is evident in so many of our activities over the years. In the earliest literature there was considerable discussion of the MLA Exchange, our first explicitly recognized cooperative effort. Other examples abound, labeled with words as telling as "centralized," "regional," "sharing," "network," "consortium." We believe in cooperation so firmly that it has truly become a traditional value for us, a way of action which we frequently use and to which we commit our resources. A sense of community with health sciences practitioners is also a value that can rightly be called traditional with us. It is evident in our literature in several ways. In the early years many doctors were members and active leaders of MLA. Their writing fills the pages of our early volumes. More recently the ratio of doctors to librarians has changed, but other health sciences practitioners have also appeared on our scene.

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And the relationship (as depicted in the literature) has become more prominently a matter of institutions than of individuals. There is every evidence that over the years we have significantly broadened our understanding of the dimensions of the health sciences community, now including ourselves as a category of specialists in that community. This extended self-image has broadened our understanding of the potential for expanded relationships for us within the entire health sciences community. There seems to me to be additional evidence of the value to us of this sense of community in the contributions of medical librarians to medical historical and bibliographical study. Again, the ratio of this scholarship to other matters published has changed, but its presence in some extent has persisted. Indeed, we have included it in our honors gallery by the awarding of a prize for excellence in medical historical writing. Thus, both in scholarship and in many operational ways, we have demonstrated throughout our existence as a group that we value our relationship with the health sciences community. If there was an early dependency on doctors for leadership and scholarship, as might be inferred from the first several decades of our literature, it has been replaced by a sense of mutuality and common cause. Knowledge orientation is, perhaps, not a very good term for another distinctive belief that I found exhibited in many ways in our literature, but no better term has come to mind. There are two faces to my meaning. One is that we value the content, the factual base, of the health sciences and we recognize its significance to our clients. While accepting custodianship of this content as our responsibility, however, we have come to see our relationship to health sciences knowledge as one far beyond a "keeping" function. From volume one of our existence we have classified, indexed, abstracted, arranged into bibliographies and da'ta bases, accessed, and delivered this knowledge for our clients-this much is our responsibility. But we have gone beyond mere obligation, searching constantly to find better ways to fulfill the responsibility, adapting in recent years the scientists' own methods of generating and testing knowledge. For scientists, knowledge gained through inductive and experimental means is their most pervasive group value [15]. Careful hypothesis, data gathering and collation, implementation, and final assessment are characteristic stages of the scientist's probing. In the second face of my meaning of knowledge orientation as a value held by health sciences librarians, I am reflecting our Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

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movement away from tradition and example in the management of our occupational responsibilities, toward management based on scientific knowledge of problems, needs, and alternative means. This movement from tradition and example to research as the foundation for library management is the most striking change in our literature as one reads it chronologically. Knowledge gained through scientific study is now the salient feature of our environment. Our work lives are aligned to that knowledge which is the factual and theoretical base for the health sciences, as well as to that knowledge which now routinely provides a factual and theoretical base for library management. Because we recognize the possession of both bodies of knowledge as a desired end-state, and because we recognize the attainment of this knowledge through systematic, rigorous research as a desired mode of conduct, I have identified knowledge orientation as one of our values. PROFESSIONALISM AS A VALUE I come now to the discussion of professionalism as a value of health sciences librarians. To some extent this emphasis on our part reflects a value held by many groups within our society. Substantial knowledge about professionalism has grown, especially in the last decade, from multidisciplinary study of the traditional professions and of some occupational groups that are presently upward bound [16]. A small segment of this research has focused on librarianship, but it has tended to study the sociologist's question-"Is librarianship a profession?"-rather than the

philosopher's question-"Is professionalism a value held by librarians?" Answers to the latter question hold the greater significance in terms of insight and implication for action. Wilbert Moore, in his synthesis of the research about professions, postulates a "scale of professionalism," which is conceived as a continuum of criteria of relative importance [17]. To read the medical library literature with Moore's scale of professionalism in mind is revealing. There are six traits, or characteristics, on this scale. The first two, in the lowest positions, are "full-time occupation, [or] the principal source of the professional's earned income" and "the professional's commitment to a calling" [17]. It appears that we have assumed from the beginning that both of these are characteristics of the majority of medical librarians; neither characteristic is a concern in our literature. It is with the next three traits on the scale that Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

much of our literature is concerned: "organization," "specialized education," and "service orientation" [17]. These characteristics of professionalism have received considerable cognitive attention from us, and I shall return to them in a moment. The final criterion on Moore's scale is "autonomy," the concept of responsible se*-discipline of the group of occupational specialists [18]. I find little evidence in our literature that we have explored the rather complex meanings of this characteristic of a profession for its relevance to us. Moore strongly suggests that there is a sequence in the process of professionalization represented by the positions of the criteria on his scale [19]. If this is so, as seems likely, then perhaps we have not arrived at this final point in our evolution as a profession. I return now to organization, specialized education, and service orientation, the three characteristics of a profession with which we have been and are now most concerned. In addition to their having been discussed in our literature, these characteristics have also been the focus of group decisions by us, and the recipients of large allocations of our common resources, evidence that lends credence to that of the literature when we draw a conclusion about the high priority of professionalism in our value system. Organization was achieved by us early on. Moore asserts that some of the motives for forming occupational organizations are of a rather low level, which he calls "practicality." By way of example, he cites the efforts of such organizations to control terms and conditions of employment. The relatively more important function of organization, according to Moore, is concern for criteria of access to employment as a member of the occupational group, exclusion of the incompetent from employment, and the "maintenance of performance standards among accepted practitioners" [20]. The value medical librarians have placed on organization is evident from the very beginning of our literature, and on both the levels identified by Moore. The "practicality" value of an organization for mutual benefit is exemplified in our literature by the large number of articles exchanging subjective information about operational procedures in medical libraries. The fact that such articles are frequently decried as "how-I-done-itgood" literature indicates the lower level of value as perceived by some members of the group. On the other hand, the continued presence of this literature suggests emphatically that it is important to others. Evidence of our concern for the

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more important function of providing criteria for professional performance is contained in the extensive literature of our certification efforts. We have moved, sometimes slowly, sometimes more rapidly, from the concept of mere access to a rank of initial acceptance (that is, certification), to that of ntaintenance of a standard performance among those accepted (that is, for us, recertification). True, we do not yet have all operational details worked out, nor can we presently enforce certification as a means of excluding the incompetent from employment in health sciences libraries. Yet neither of these facts nullifies the significance of the value we place on this aspect of organizational responsibility. Specialized education is described by Moore as "some final, 'finishing' part of the formal education ... designed as preparation for the specialized occupation." Moore assumes that a profession will have formulated standards for its specialized education, and he finds that "educational standards for almost every technical occupation rise through time" [21]. The efforts of medical librarians to achieve our specialized education have also been chronicled in a voluminous literature. The latest contribution is a review of the current teaching of health sciences librarianship in the graduate library schools by Roper. Roper reviews the forty years of formal course work as preparation for employment in medical libraries; he surveys the current status of these courses and concludes that "the more we change, the more we stay the same" [22]. I was struck, as I reread the literature, with how little we have tried to establish, maintain, and improve standards for our formal education as health sciences librarians. This is not to deny that we have in the past made an effort in the direction of standards. It is to say, however, that we abandoned the one means with which we experimented the accreditation of courses-and we have substituted no other. There are alternatives; we do not have to give up the projection of educational standards. Of course, it might be considered, as an alternative to accreditation, that the certification code provides a standard. Roper's questionnaire to the teachers of specialized courses asked whether the new code represented a change in our occupational environment that would precipitate changes in the educational offerings. The majority of teachers responded: "No changes at the present time." A further question, related to the eventual effect of the certification code on health sciences library education, brought out some specific ex-

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pectations that do anticipate change. Some teachers foresee a demand for certification examination review courses; others foresee a change of emphasis in courses in the direction of the competencies covered by the examination [22]. In the critical spirit of my role as philosopher, I have to point out that, if we accept certification as the standardizing factor in our specialized formal education without further dialogue, and if we allow the certification examination to be our only impetus for change in the introductory courses, we will be allowing our basic education to develop in an unplanned, uncoordinated way. Before I continue with the idea of standards for our specialized education, let me point out that one of the very real changes in values evidenced in our literature is the increasingly important position of continuing education in our value system. The relation of continuing education to professionalism is uncontested in medical library literature, and it apparently rates a higher position in the value system of practitioners than does introductory, formal education. In recent years continuing education has been the focus of more discussion, decision, and action on our part than has the introductory education. Guidelines for our developing continuing education program, especially for the control of quality in the program, are embodied in the policies of the Continuing Education Committee and are in that sense de facto standards. Looking at us again in the critical spirit of the philosopher, I would point out what is to me an anomaly: we value specialized education for its role in professionalism and we accept responsibility for maintaining an extensive system of continuing education including at least some de facto standards, but we have not developed a complementary system for introductory education for health sciences librarianship, nor have we stated our standards for such education. Some will say the responsibility for introductory education is not ours, even more strongly that we cannot and should not assume such responsibility. There are several responses to this assertion. One is that Moore's study clearly shows that acceptance of responsibility for specialized education is a characteristic of occupational groups at some time during their evolution as professions; so that sooner or later, if we are to achieve that highly valued status, we must face the responsibility. Another response, and a more important one in my view, is that a system of education requires planning and evaluation components, as well as the delivery of content. We, as specialized Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

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practitioners of librarianship, do have a responsibility for planning and evaluating-if not for the delivery of-the basic education for our specialization. (Actually, the majority of teachers of these specialized courses are librarians practicing in health sciences libraries [22], but I am discussing our corporate effort here, not the contributions of individuals.) There are recognized procedures for the design of education, and the development of standards is an important component in these procedures, especially in relation to planning and evaluating. That is where our major responsibility lies. There is a further argument that bespeaks the necessity for us to now devote an effort to the development of standards for basic education for health sciences librarianship. In point of fact, introductory education and continuing education are not separate, complementary systems; they are parts of a single totality-specialized professional education. Linkages between them are needed in planning, delivery, and evaluation. This includes linkage between standards for basic education and standards for continuing education. Service orientation, as a criterion of professionalism, assumes that there are clients who seek the professional's services, usually as individuals but sometimes as client-groups, and that the interests of these clients are more important than the self-interests of practitioners of the occupation. In operational terms service orientation means the regulation of the professional's conduct vis-a-vis clients by performance norms. Discussion of this criterion in the literature of professionalism emphasizes standards in excess of those of entry to the occupation [23]. As Moore explains, service orientation is a complex construct in which concepts of competence, conscientiousness, and ethical beliefs are interrelated. Some interest in performance standards of various kinds has been hinted from time to time in our literature; very occasionally the interest has been more fully discussed. There is evidence that we are becoming concerned as a group with standards related to the nature and especially the quality of service to our clients. Before going on to summarize I would like to return to Rokeach's findings about values to emphasize one more concept. Rokeach identified and named two distinct types of values. Those related to a desired end-state of existence he calls "terminal values"; and those related to the behavioral means by which end-state is to be achieved he calls "instrumental values." Further, Rokeach found that there are fewer terminal values than Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

instrumental ones, and that, while terminal values are likely to be of great duration, instrumental values may possibly be more readily changed as society and individuals change [24]. Within the framework of enduring terminal values changes in instrumental values are sometimes reflected only as changes in priorities for action. At other times some instrumental values formerly adhered to are abandoned altogether as guides for action, and different behaviors are substituted [25]. It would appear that within a given group there is likely to be greater agreement on terminal values and more differentiation of belief in relation to specific instrumental values. To summarize: From my study of the literature of health sciences librarianship it seems apparent to me that professionalism is one of our most enduring and most strongly held group values, perhaps the keystone of our value system. It preceded organization as an attribute of medical librarians and is identifiable as one of the motives for forming the association. It is also identifiable as a currently and strongly held value. We have explored its cognitive aspects, and we accept most of those which have been identified in the research about professionalism. We assume that people will work full time as medical librarians or earn the major part of their incomes from this occuaption, and we have tended to ignore the question of whether or not such employment represents a commitment to a calling. We display strong affective ties to the concept of professional organization, and our literature reflects our healthy concern to make MLA viable and effective. We have chosen certification as a means to control access to the ranks of the "accepted" members of our occupational group, and recertification as a means to monitor the continuing performance of those so accepted. Whether or not certification turns out to be an enduring, strongly held value, instrumental to our achievement of the professional status we desire, we do not really yet know. Certainly at the present time we perceive a strong relationship between the two. We also display strong affective ties to our belief in specialized education as a value and to its relationship to professionalism. It appears in some ways that belief in the value of continuing education is more strongly held than belief in the value of specialized introductory education; for one, we presently expend more effort to provide guidance and to maintain standards for continuing education than for the specialized introductory education. And finally, we are in an exploratory stage of value development about regulation of the quality of 387

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service we provide. We have accepted the idea that our clients' interests are of greater importance than our own, and we are in the process of enlarging our view of precisely who our clients are. It remains to be seen whether or not we will accept regulation of service norms by the group as a means of assuring quality service to the clients of a particular library. On balance, it seems that we understand and adhere to, as value-beliefs, most of the criteria on a recognized scale of professionalism, and that we use these values as guides for group action and for the investment of group resources. It seems to me that "professionalism" is a terminal value, unlikely to be abandoned in the foreseeable future. "Cooperation," "sense of community with health sciences practitioners," and "knowledge orientation" seem also to be terminal values with us, likely to be persistently enduring. ENDANGERED SPECIES The title of this lecture, "Books and Other Endangered Species," was chosen as a symbolic one; "books" and "species," betoken our group values. Thus far, it seems I have been reporting more enduring species than endangered ones. These are the hardy values the vigorous existence of which I feel certain of even on the basis of a subjective, exploratory study. There are also some unanswered questions which may, as long as they remain unanswered, represent challenge to longheld values. I consider it part of my role as amateur philosopher to state at least some of these questions. First, I would question my own study by asking, "Are the conclusions of this subjective inquiry valid by the standards of rigorous research methodology?" I would also ask, of a more scientific study, whether priorities among our values are discernible. It would be beneficial for us to have a complete picture of our value system, especially at times of inevitable conflict between values. Second, I would ask, "What are the contradictions among our values? What are the implications of these contradictions for change?" For it is obvious even in exploratory study that there are some. Our self-image, for example, suffers certain confusions, to put a milder term on the phenomenon. My own reflection of this confusion shows in this very lecture, as I have struggled with whether to call us "medical librarians" or "health sciences librarians," and in the uneasy usage I finally adopted. There appear to me to be confusion and contradiction also in the assumptions underlying our actions-and lack of actions-regarding

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specialized introductory education, continuing education, and performance norms. We seem to be at an appropriate stage of evolution as a profession to tackle the entire question of standards related to these values, and I applaud our incoming President, Erika Love, and the board of directors, for their insight in appointing a committee now to study health sciences library standards. But I would be remiss if I did not point out the relationship between library standards, educational standards, and performance standards. You literally cannot effectively have one without the others. Nor can the relationship between the underlying assumptions of these various standards and our values be ignored. Questions about our value contradictions have a special operational importance at the present time. The matter of self-image is so important that I return to it for a third cluster of questions, beginning with "What are the dimensions and contours of our self-image?" As an occupational group we have changed considerably from the days of medical school and medical society dominance. We now accommodate more or less easily an increasing number of subspecialties: dental, nursing, pharmacy school librarians; hospital and clinic librarians; institutional librarians of several varieties-to name only some of our subgroups. Who is a medical/health sciences librarian? Are we ready to include-at the same level of acceptance-patient librarians? Media specialists? Public librarians who deal with laymen's healthrelated questions? Biomedical communications specialists? Bibliotherapists? Library technical assistants? Teachers of health sciences librarians who are not also practitioners? Some of these categories appear to me to be regarded ambiguously by some of us. How to answer the question "Who are we?" has implications beyond simply what we call ourselves. The real question is "What is the core of our being, our specialty, our knowledge, that all of us have in common?" The answer to that question has meaning for our education, our certification, and our standards-in short, for most of our instrumental values. It is also important, and for similar operational reasons, to understand the degree of coincidence between our self-image and that of other groups of librarians. I suspect that there is less coincidence than many persons believe, and I would like to know-especially for my purposes of recruitment, counseling, and curriculum planning-exactly what the differences are. It appears to me that, coupled with the present acceptance of movement of persons (for Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

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employment) among various types of libraries, considerable challenge to our traditional terminal values could come from differences in self-image. As another side of this question, I would suggest that we need to pay some attention to the concept of our occupation as a "calling." We have assumed it to be so in the past, rightly, I believe, at least in the sense of commitment to life-long specialization and employment for those who entered it. But contradictory forces are at work in society-and in the expectations of student populations of library schools! The implications of this fact for challenge to our long-held value of professionalism appear to me to be significant. How can we change to accommodate this societal change without damage to our prime value, professionalism? Before I leave self-image as a source for questions, let me raise one more: "How does our selfimage compare with that of other groups of professionals with whom we work, specifically scientists and educators?" I know, for example, of the primary position of knowledge orientation in the value system of scientists, and I have tried to show its similar significance for us. If there is coincidence between our self-image and that of scientists and educators, the possibility of a linkage between these value systems has great potential for us. The value systems of scientists, educators, and ourselves, and linkages between them, seem to me not only worthy of study but important to the survival of some of our endangered values. I come away from this glimpse of the values of health sciences librarianship heartened by those I find to be enduring and alerted to the need for protective measures for or reevaluation of those that appear endangered. I feel I have gained confidence and direction as I turn to both teaching and my continuing responsibilities within MLA. If you also have gained some new ideas or reexamined

Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978

some old ones, then for the stimulus that led us to this experience, we can all thank Janet Doe. REFERENCES 1. FEATHER, NORMAN T. Values in Education and Society. New York, Free Press, Macmillan, 1975. p. 1-2. 2. INLOw, GAIL M. Values in Transition. New York, Wiley, 1972. p. 126. 3. ZACHERT, M. J. K. Values of special librarians

embodied in Special Libraries, 1953-1963.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Tallahassee, Fla., School of Library Science, Florida State University, 1963. Unpublished curriculum-study position paper. ROKEACH, MILTON. The Nature of Human Values. New York, Free Press, Macmillan, 1973. Ibid. p. 4. Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. p. 5-6. Ibid. p. I 1. Ibid. p. 7. LERNER, MAX. Values in Education: Notes Toward a Value Philosophy. Bloomington, Ind., Phi Delta Kappa, 1976. p. 108-112. ROKEACH. Op. cit. p. 13. ALLPORT, GORDON W. Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. p. 454. Also in: ROKEACH. Op. cit. p. 7. ROKEACH. Op. cit. p. 215-216. Ibid. p. 286. INLOW. Op. cit. p. 105-106. MOORE, WILBERT E. The Professions: Roles and Rules. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1970. Ibid. p. 5-6. Ibid. p. 15-16. Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. p. 9.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. Ibid.p.ll. 22. ROPER, FRED W. Untitled preliminary draft of paper, April 1978; letter, Roper to Irwin Pizer, April 13, 1978. Quoted with permission. 23. MOORE. Op. cit. p. 13-15. 24. ROKEACH. Op. cit. p. 11-15. 25. Ibid. p. 376.

Received July 5, 1978; accepted July 29, 1978.

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Books and other endangered species: an inquiry into the values of medical librarianship.

Books and Other Endangered Species An Inquiry into the Values of Medical Librarianship* BY MARTHA JANE K. ZACHERT, D.L.S., Professor College ofLibrar...
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