ALA at 150, A Vote and A Vision
What Libraries Are For
Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information | June 1, 2026 | Vol. 4, Issue 29 Supplement | Open Access | Last Revised 06/02/2026 6:19 pm with March 2026 ALA Membership Data in Notes and adding Helen Haines and Miriam Mathews as early pioneers of Intellectual Freedom in California (LA Public Library)
Intellectual Freedom | Library and Information Science | Wellbeing
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Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026, June 1). ALA at 150, a vote and a vision: What libraries are for. Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information 4(29 Suppl.).
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ALA at 150, A Vote and A Vision
What Libraries Are For
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The vote was overwhelming: 77 to 4, with 95% of ballots cast in favor of forming ALA Workers United. When the employees of the American Library Association voted to unionize in its 150th year, the result is history arriving at a conclusion that has been a century and a half in the making.
ALA was founded in 1876 by a group of mostly male librarians and academics convening in Philadelphia. The profession they helped establish was quickly feminized and its daily work built and sustained by educated women whom historian Dee Garrison later called ‘apostles of culture,’ doing civic labor the nation and society admired and underpaid. Often led by men, women like Katharine Sharp nevertheless built key library schools and the credential system, the accreditation apparatus and the post graduate degree requirements that came to define librarianship as a learned profession rather than a genteel vocation. On its 150th anniversary, the employees of their flagship organization voted, nearly unanimously, to form a union.
The union drive didn’t come from nowhere. It followed months of internal reorganization, workforce reductions, and voluntary buyouts. In their organizing letter, employees cited increased workloads, benefit reductions, salary disparities, low morale, and a lack of transparent decision-making. ALA also announced a financial deficit of $15.4 million, and staff attrition throughout 2025 resulted in a workforce decline of roughly 16.7%. The priorities ALAWU named going forward — salary equity, parental leave, retirement benefits, transparency — are not exotic demands. They are the fundamentals.
And yet the symbolism cuts deeper than the immediate grievances. ALA is funded largely by a profession that has long struggled with modest and uneven compensation. Public, school, and academic librarians frequently work within constrained budgets, with pay varying dramatically by institution, geography, and specialty. In his landmark report in 1923, C. C. Williamson observed that librarians had long been submerged by routine duties, underpaid and unrecognized. A century later, the employees of the profession’s own association are raising the same concerns. The structural conditions of librarianship, it turns out, have proved more durable than its curricula, its credentials, or its professional aspirations.
The union vote is striking on its own. But it arrives inside a profession already fractured by deeper questions of identity — not merely who librarians are, but what intelligence the profession is organized to serve and protect. Librarians debate compensation, yes, but also what librarianship itself should be: its balance of neutrality and advocacy, its role in social services, and its ties to intellectual freedom.
Their own credentialing question runs just as deep.
Bryn Geffert, Degrees of Academic Librarians: The Case for Capacious Credentialing (2026), documents what many in the profession have quietly known: the ALA accredited MLS is losing its grip as the mandatory credential for academic library work. Sixty-five percent of major research universities now have policies allowing them to appoint librarians without an MLS, and 63% of administrators support recruiting PhD-holders from other fields into librarian roles. Only 15% believe that librarians without an MLS are less effective than those with one and this figure falls to 5% at the largest and most research-intensive institutions.
The reasons are partly pragmatic. Sixty-one percent of administrators report that it is prohibitively difficult to hire all the librarians they need if they limit searches exclusively to MLS candidates. Research libraries need people with expertise in data science, digital scholarship, computational methods, STEM fields, and scholarly communications, skills that library schools are either not covering well or no longer including. One administrator captured the frustration plainly: “I have come to believe that librarianship, as taught in MLS programs, and libraries are increasingly unconnected.”
Geffert also raises a diversity argument for opening credentialing: that the MLS pipeline, being predominantly white, limits representation. The concern is real. But it deserves more rigorous treatment than a single demographic percentage can provide and two 2022 studies in Library Trends offer exactly that. Coleman’s paper and the companion statistical study by Buchel and Coleman together mount a methodological challenge to how the profession has measured and understood diversity. Their critique is more rigorous, not less committed to diversity and it demands better tools, not lower stakes.
Coleman surveys the landscape of Equity Diversity Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) drawing from beyond LIS and including the diversity literature from the management disciplines to identify library trends in the international context, then, offers a foundational premise: there is one human race, many cultures, each person is unique, and difference is the norm. An invisible dominance of U.S.-centrism operates throughout American library literature on diversity, reinforcing cultural hegemony while paradoxically claiming to dismantle it. Critical race theory, she observes, is insufficient in transnational and international contexts — in India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa, the dimensions of inequity that shape lives are caste, tribe, and income, not race. Even within the United States, the number of people identifying as mixed race or of two or more races is rising. Racialization keeps racism alive rather than dismantling it. The goal of social justice is to help all people thrive, and a critical diversity management approach grounded in infinite human differences as an advantage — the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis — offers a more durable path than demographic engineering.
Buchel operationalized this framework. Using entropy scores, k-means clustering, and principal component analysis to compare library occupations against 354 other fields, she demonstrated that the averages and percentages typically cited in library diversity literature create an illusion of evidence, masking relationships and patterns that only comparative, multidimensional analysis can reveal. Crucially, Buchel and Coleman’s conclusions are not a dismissal of diversity work but a call for better science: the authors urge renewal of the ALA Diversity Counts studies using improved methodology, make their full dataset publicly available, and call for future research into how library staff diversity affects service quality in communities with high proportions of foreign-born, disabled, and low-income patrons, and how libraries can function as social barometers in an unequal society. These are the questions of a serious and committed diversity research program, not the abandonment of one.
If that framework is right, then decades of diversity programming built around demographic pipeline targets may have been solving the wrong problem with insufficient tools. None of this means the profession’s representational challenges aren’t real. It means that invoking pipeline demographics as the primary argument for abandoning the MLS credential asks more of a single data point than it can bear — and that the profession deserves a more rigorous conversation than it has so far managed to have.
None of this settles the credentialing debate on other grounds. Defenders of the MLS make real arguments: the degree provides a common professional foundation, a shared ethics, and a signal of commitment to the field. The worry that abandoning it will accelerate the deprofessionalization of librarianship is not frivolous. But administrators who have actually hired and worked with non-MLS librarians are significantly more likely to view them as effective, and 93% of those who have done so plan to do so again. Experience dissolves anxiety.
The iSchool movement adds another layer to the question of the 21st century librarians’ professional identity. As information schools have expanded — absorbing or enlarging computer science, data science, and communication disciplines — the relationship between their curricula and traditional library science has grown increasingly strained. Most visibly, at UNC Chapel Hill, the century-old School of Information and Library Science was consolidated in 2026 to form the School of Data and Information Sciences. The new school launches July 1, 2026, with a data scientist at its head; the former library school dean was appointed Chief AI Officer for the university, a role that takes him out of library education altogether. The field that accredits library programs is not necessarily producing graduates prepared for the work those graduates are entering.
Meanwhile ALA’s membership has declined from a peak of roughly 65,000 to under 48,000; its affiliates — AILA, APALA, BCALA, CALA, REFORMA, and others — cultivate communities that feel more like professional homes than the parent organization does. And peer associations like the Special Libraries Association (SLA) have sought their futures elsewhere: merging with the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) rather than with ALA.
These are signs that the center is not holding. And they matter because what is eroding is not an association, but an idea.
Libraries, archives, museums, and art galleries are among the last institutions in American life that exist not to extract value but to protect, replenish, and grow it: the cultural heritage infrastructure of a democratic society. Their steady erosion across the United States is not incidental to the other pressures described here. It is the same pressure: the pressure of a society that constitutionally enshrines innovation and intellectual property while systematically defunding the commons those protections were meant to serve. When the commons weakens, the institutions that embody it feel it first, and the people who work in them feel it too.
Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting a young and contentious America in the 1830s, marveled at something he could not find in Europe: the genius for voluntary association. Americans pulled apart by liberty and difference kept pulling back together around shared purpose: plural, self-organizing, ungoverned from above. It was, he thought, the democratic answer to fragmentation: not imposed coherence but chosen coherence, built from the ground up.
ALA at 150 still has that instinct. The union vote is associational energy. The scholars arguing for more rigorous frameworks for understanding diversity — Coleman and Buchel’s statistical work from a positionality grounded in living between cultures, between disciplines, between the Global South, Eastern Europe, the American West, Canada — are associational energy. The library educators at ALISE, the medical librarians at MLA, the theological librarians at ATLA, the ethnic caucuses sustaining their own professional communities within and alongside ALA — each is associational energy. ALA at 150 need not be the sole container for all of it. It might instead become what de Tocqueville admired most: not the largest association, but the one capacious enough to convene the others around what they share.
What they share, at bottom, is a commitment to what we might call freedom of intelligence — a phrase with two distinct roots. One is the Enlightenment tradition of Mill and First Amendment jurisprudence that ALA formally enshrined in its Library Bill of Rights in 1939 and the Freedom to Read statement in 1953. The other, running longer and deeper, is John Dewey's insistence that democracy is "more than a form of government — it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience," and that genuine freedom means "freeing intelligence for independent effectiveness" through purposeful, democratic education. The phrase has been borrowed recently for AI policy arguments that mistake access to thinking machines for the thing itself. But librarians have always known the difference. Freedom of intelligence is not a feature of a system. It is a condition of human dignity: more demanding than neutrality, more serious about human flourishing than demographic engineering, and more honest about democracy, and about the social life of information, than any platform that has co-opted the term.
ALA was founded in 1876 with the modest ambition "to enable librarians to do their present work more easily and at less expense." One hundred and fifty years later, its employees voted 77 to 4 to insist on their own dignity as workers. The two acts are expressions of the same conviction: that the people who protect the conditions for human intelligence deserve, themselves, to think and work and organize freely.
The vote was 77 to 4. One hundred and fifty years in, the message is clear. The work continues.
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Notes
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American Library Association. (n.d.). 1876. https://www.ala.org/aboutala/1876-0
Documents the founding of ALA at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, October 4–6, 1876. Of 103 librarians who responded to a call issued by Melvil Dewey, Justin Winsor, C. A. Cutter, Samuel S. Green, and others, 90 were men and 13 were women. The founding aim of the Association was “to enable librarians to do their present work more easily and at less expense.”
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American Library Association. (n.d.). Member groups and affiliated organizations. https://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/diversity/groups and American Library Association. (2025, June 16). Membership update — What's new at ALA. Executive Director's Report (EBD 12.13). https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2025-06/EBD%2012.13%20ED%20Report.pdf + 2026, April 24 Meeting Minutes DRAFT (EBD 2.9). https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2026-05/ebd%202.9%20Board%20Spring%20Meeting%20Minutes%20DRAFT.pdf
The first lists ALA’s affiliated organizations and the last two report membership data. ALA membership stood at 47,247 in 2024, 46,564 and 43, 492 in 2025, and 45,671 at the end of March 2026 — a continuing decline from a peak of approximately 65,000 in the early 2000s. The affiliate network includes the ethnic caucuses collaborating with the Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services: APALA, BCALA, CALA, REFORMA, AILA, and the Joint Council of Librarians of Color (JCLC), among 27 total affiliates. These organizations are not governed by ALA but share aligned missions and maintain independent membership communities, conferences, and scholarship programs.
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American Theological Library Association. (n.d.). About ATLA. https://www.atla.com/about/
Founded in 1946, ATLA is an ALA affiliate serving theological and religious studies libraries and librarians, with more than 1,000 individual, institutional, and affiliate members. Like MLA and ALISE, ATLA represents a model of specialist association coherence — clear mission, defined constituency, and deep integration with its parent discipline — and is a natural partner for the kind of associational coalition the essay describes. Legally separate from ALA but aligned in mission and formally recognized as an affiliate by ALA Council.
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Association for Computing Machinery. (2024, March 12). Communications of the ACM relaunched as open access, web-first publication. https://www.acm.org/media-center/2024/march/cacm-relaunch
Announces the relaunch of Communications of the ACM (CACM), first published in 1958, as a web-first, fully open-access publication under editor-in-chief James Larus. ACM, with approximately 100,000 members globally, restructured its entire economic model — from institutional subscription licenses to an author-side publishing fee framework called ACM OPEN — in order to make its flagship publication freely available worldwide. The shift positions ACM as a fully open-access publisher and demonstrates how a large, established professional computing association can reinvent its reach and relevance without dissolving its identity. An instructive contrast to library associations still navigating questions of membership decline, open access, and sustainability.
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Association for Information Science and Technology. (2025, August 21). ASIS&T and SLA members vote in favor of merger. https://www.asist.org/2025/08/21/asist-and-sla-members-vote-in-favor-of-merger/
Announces the successful membership vote approving the merger of SLA (founded 1909, approximately 1,200 members at time of merger, down from a peak of around 14,400 in 1997) with ASIS&T (founded 1937, approximately 2,100 members). Both organizations cited the evolving landscape of information science and the need for a stronger collective voice. The SLA board developed a dissolution plan to manage the transition. The combined organization of roughly 3,300 members chose to merge with a research-oriented information science association rather than with ALA: a signal of where specialized library and information professionals see their professional future.
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Association for Library and Information Science Education. (n.d.). About ALISE. https://alise.org/page/About
ALISE traces its origins to the Round Table of Library School Instructors at ALA conferences, formally constituted in 1915 as the Association of American Library Schools and renamed ALISE in 1983. Today it describes itself as the global leader in education for the information professions internationally. Publishes the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (JELIS) since 1960. A relatively small organization of LIS educators and scholars, ALISE membership figures are not publicly reported, but the organization serves primarily faculty, doctoral students, and institutional members across accredited LIS programs. An ALA affiliate with a distinct mission focused on educators rather than practitioners, and a natural partner for efforts to reimagine LIS education.
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Bertram, C. (2023). Exhibit: ALA and Intellectual Freedom. ALA Archives. https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2023/06/20/exhibit-intellectual-freedom/
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Buchel, O., & Coleman, A. S. (2022). A statistical essay on diversity in the library professions compared to other occupations in the United States of America. Library Trends, 71(2), 303–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2022.a922380
Using entropy scores, k-means clustering, and principal component analysis across 354 occupational categories drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, this study compares the racial and ethnic composition of library occupations to all other U.S. occupations. The authors argue that the averages and percentages commonly cited in library diversity literature create an illusion of evidence, masking underlying patterns and relationships. The complexity-science approach suggests that diversity in library occupations can only be meaningfully understood in comparative and multidimensional context.
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Buchel, O. & Coleman, A. S. (n.d.). Data science and diversity in libraries [Companion website]. https://dataforlibs.github.io/data_science_for_libs/index.html
Open-access companion to the two Library Trends articles above, providing interactive visualizations, diversity scores, and variance data for library occupations compared to 354 other fields. Argues that management decisions in libraries are too often based on statistical averages that lack deeper insight into variance and underlying structural differences, and that data science offers more valid, reliable, and applicable tools for diversity research and management than conventional percentage-based reporting.
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Coleman, A. S. (1996). Public performances and private acts. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 37(4), 325–342. https://hdl.handle.net/10150/105049
Cited here for Coleman’s discussion of Williamson’s 1923 Carnegie report observation at pp. 330-331: librarians have long been “submerged by routine duties, underpaid and unrecognized” — a characterization that, Coleman in 1996 notes, had changed little in the intervening decades in this, her examination of LIS distance education.
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Coleman, A. S. (2022). International contexts and US trends in equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in libraries. Library Trends, 71(2), 254–283. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2022.a922378
Examines equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts in libraries against an international backdrop and a broad framework of diversity management research. Argues that U.S. library literature has focused too narrowly on race, gender, and sexual orientation, and calls for expanding the conception of human difference to include age, income, disability, geography, and other dimensions. Identifies three major trends — social well-being, cultural learning, and social justice — while offering a theoretical framework in which difference is understood as the norm and the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis.
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de Tocqueville, A. (1840). Democracy in America (Vol. 2, H. Reeve, Trans.). Saunders and Otley. Available via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm
The association passages the essay draws on appear in Volume II, Part II, Chapter 5: “Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations in Civil Life.” Tocqueville observed that wherever a new undertaking required collective action, Americans formed a voluntary association — “to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes... to found establishments for education.” His most celebrated formulation: “In democratic countries, the science of association is the mother science. The progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.” ALA founded in 1876, one year after the first public libraries movement took root, is a direct expression of this American associational genius.
Freedom of intelligence. ALA’s intellectual freedom tradition is rooted primarily in Enlightenment philosophy — John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) and the First Amendment jurisprudence that informed the Library Bill of Rights (1939). Knox stresses Mill’s centrality; see Knox, E. (2026). Book Banning in 21st-Century America. 2nd ed. Bloomsbury. The most current official treatment of ALA's intellectual freedom framework appears in Jones, E., & Office for Intellectual Freedom. (2026). Intellectual Freedom Manual (11th ed.). ALA Editions. https://alastore.ala.org/ifm11. The manual centers practical guidance on censorship response, privacy, and access while drawing on ALA's core IF documents. The framework of freedom of intelligence offered in this essay argues for a philosophical foundation that resolves rather than restates the unresolved tension between intellectual freedom and social responsibility that has characterized ALA's approach since 1939.
In Democracy and Education (1916) John Dewey writes of "the freedom of observation and imagination involved in the modern scientific revolution" as something that was "not easily secured" — meaning genuine freedom is won through cultivated capacity, not granted by the absence of constraints. He also explores social efficiency, by which he meant "capacity to share in a give and take of experience... all that makes one's own experience more worth while to others, and all that enables one to participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of others." This is empathy as democratic infrastructure, not sentiment, and the standard by which AI systems trained on culturally narrow data must be judged: not by processing power but by capacity for genuine epistemic exchange across human difference. Borrowing from Dewey, freedom of intelligence as used in this essay names that commitment: the capacity to observe, imagine, empathize, and judge in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worthwhile. The Deweyan foundations of American librarianship are documented in LIS scholarship; see Buschman, J. (2017). Once more unto the breach: ‘Overcoming epistemology’ and librarianship’s de facto Deweyan pragmatism. Journal of Documentation, 73(2), 210–223. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2016-0052
The phrase entered recent AI policy discourse in 2025. See Coleman, A. S. (2025, May 24). Freedom of intelligence, democratized: the new intellectual freedom. Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information, 3(28). https://infophilia.substack.com/p/freedom-of-intelligence-democratized. It critiques OpenAI’s framing and extends the concept to encompass ethical governance, cultural diversity, democratic accountability, and protection of human cognitive sovereignty. The fuller scholarly argument is coming, including early women librarian pioneers in California, LAPL Miriam Matthews, Helen Haines, and engaging the historians and critics Cindy Mediavilla, Wayne Wiegand, Christine Jenkins, Eliza Dresang, and others whose work documents the unresolved tensions in ALA's intellectual freedom tradition that freedom of intelligence is proposed to address.
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Garrison, D. (1979). Apostles of culture: The public librarian and American society, 1876–1920. Free Press.
Landmark historical study documenting the feminization of American public librarianship in the decades following ALA’s founding. Garrison argues that the profession was rapidly taken over by educated women who performed civic and cultural labor the broader society admired but systematically underpaid and undervalued — coining the phrase “apostles of culture” that has defined how historians understand this period of the profession’s development.
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Geffert, B. (2026). Degrees of academic librarians: The case for capacious credentialing. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009725736
Reports on a survey of 167 library directors at R1 and R2 doctoral universities as defined by the Carnegie Classification, and ARL (Association of Research Libraries) and AAU (Association of American Universities) member institutions, examining beliefs and practices around credentialing. Argues that traditional and restrictive credentialing practices hamper the profession, and that more capacious hiring — including PhD holders from other disciplines — better serves the research needs of contemporary academic libraries. Available open access on Cambridge Core.
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iSchools Inc. (n.d.). About: History. https://www.ischools.org/about/history
Traces the iSchools organization from its origins in informal meetings among U.S. LIS deans in the late 1980s (the “iCaucus,” beginning with Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Drexel) through formal establishment in 2005 and incorporation in 2014. Now encompasses over 130 member universities on all inhabited continents, with administrative offices in Berlin; North American institutions are no longer a majority of membership. Covers AI, data science, human-computer interaction, information organization, bibliometrics, and information integrity. The organization’s own history notes that questions about the coherence of the iSchools movement have overtaken earlier questions about its endurance, a tension directly relevant to the growing disjunct between iSchool curricula and core LIS.
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Medical Library Association. (n.d.). About MLA. https://www.mlanet.org/
MLA, founded in 1898, is an ALA affiliate serving health information professionals — a designation the organization has used for at least three decades to reflect a professional identity broader than the institutional setting of health sciences libraries. With more than 3,000 individual members and 400 institutional members, MLA represents a model of specialist association coherence: clear mission, defined constituency, and deep integration with its parent discipline. A natural partner for ALA coalition-building given complementary rather than competing missions.
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Newmark, R. (2026, May 27). ALA workers vote yes on union. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/ala-workers-vote-yes-on-union/
Reports on the formation of ALA Workers United, which won its union election 77–4 — 81 out of 87 ballots counted, with six votes challenged. Of ALA's 154 total employees, 93 were eligible to vote; 95% of counted ballots favored unionization. The union will bargain under AFSCME Council 31. The union effort followed months of internal reorganization, a $15.4 million financial deficit, and a workforce decline of roughly 16.7% through 2025. Employees cited increased workloads, benefit reductions, salary disparities, low morale, and lack of organizational transparency. Priorities going forward include salary equity, parental leave, retirement benefits, and greater transparency.
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Raghavan, K. S. (2011). Research in the iSchools: An examination. Annals of Library and Information Studies, 58(2), 84–95.
Profiles research output from six iSchools to construct the domain of interest the movement claims for itself. Finds no clear or consistent construct of what constitutes that domain across institutions — research profiles differ significantly between schools. Notes that the iSchool movement represents not only a response to the perceived mismatch between LIS education and the job market, but also an effort to elevate the discipline’s status in higher education. The paper is one of the earliest substantive examinations of iSchool coherence from an international (Indian) perspective, raising questions that remain unresolved.
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Rasmussen, C. H. (2026). Equality in a democratic public library context: Rights, redistribution, and recognition. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006261444724
Applies a three-part equality framework — rights, redistribution, and recognition — to the democratic public library, arguing that equality cannot be reduced to equal access alone but must encompass redistributive functions and recognition of difference. Provides a normative foundation for understanding the public library as a commons institution within a democratic society. Directly relevant to the cultural heritage and IP/commons argument gestured at in this essay; the fuller treatment is reserved for a companion piece on intellectual property, the public domain, and the defunding of cultural heritage infrastructure in America.
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Seadle, M., Thompson, L., Kaden, B., Kleineberg, M., Wang, D., Bugaje, M., & Chowdhury, G. (2021). The iSchools: A study. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 58(1).
Panel paper presenting international findings from the funded project i4G: Shaping the iSchools’ Identity and Interaction in a Globalized World, based on interviews with iSchool leaders across regions as of 2020–21. Reports that early questions about the movement’s endurance have been overtaken by questions about its coherence — particularly regarding views on the field of information, faculty and institutional relationships, and alliances within and beyond the iSchools organization. A recent analysis cited within finds that the interests, concerns, and contexts of the three regional groupings (North American, European/African, Asia Pacific) diverge significantly, and that LIS education remains a focus to varying degrees across schools.
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Sharp, K. L. (1865–1914). Peterson, D. (2026, February 17). Ingenious: The best. University of Illinois Alumni Association. https://uiaa.org/2026/02/17/ingenious-the-best/
When organizers of the Armour Institute in Chicago were seeking “the best man” to head their new library in 1893, they sought the advice of Melvil Dewey, who responded: “The best man in America is a woman, and she is in the next room.” He was referring to Katharine L. Sharp, who in 1897 became the first woman to head a library program at a major American university, at the University of Illinois. Sharp built the curriculum and credential infrastructure that helped define librarianship as a learned profession — her library school at Illinois becoming, by 1907, a rival of Dewey’s own program in Albany. ALA named her one of the 100 most important library leaders of the 20th century. Her story encapsulates the central paradox of the profession’s founding: male authorities named and endorsed women’s labor, while women built the institutions that endured.
For the definitive scholarly biography see Grotzinger, L. A. (1966). The power and the dignity: Librarianship and Katharine Sharp. Scarecrow Press. For the broader context of women in library education see Maack, M. N. (1986). Women in library education: A lost legacy. Library Trends, 34(3), 401–440.
The school Sharp founded as GSLIS — now the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois (iSchool) — is currently led by Professor Emily Knox, a scholar of intellectual freedom and book banning.
A disclosure: Coleman is a PhD graduate of the University of Illinois iSchool and her collaborator Buchel’s MLS is from the same school (then called GSLIS), where they met first as teacher and student.
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (2025, October 9). University leadership announces development of new school at Carolina. https://www.unc.edu/posts/2025/10/09/development-of-a-new-school-at-carolina/
Announces the consolidation of UNC’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS, founded 1931) and the School of Data Science and Society into a new AI-focused institution, effective July 1, 2026, named the School of Data and Information Sciences. The decision was announced to faculty one day before going public, prompting concern among SILS students and faculty about the future of library science within an AI-dominant framework. The SILS dean was simultaneously appointed Chief AI Officer and Vice Provost for AI, with the data science dean leading the new school. Widely cited as a signal of how university administrations are repositioning library and information science within the broader AI turn.
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Williamson, C. C. (1923). Training for library service: A report prepared for the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Carnegie Corporation.
It recommended graduate-level training as the minimum for professional librarianship, and directly prompted ALA’s creation of an accreditation system in 1923–1925, and established the graduate-level credential as the standard professional credential. Williamson’s observation that librarians had long been “submerged by routine duties, underpaid and unrecognized” — cited in Coleman (1996, pp. 330–331) — establishes that the compensation, status, and identity problems documented in the 2026 ALA union vote are not new phenomena but structural features of the profession persisting across a full century. The report is also the origin point of the credentialing system that Geffert’s study argues should now be liberalized.
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