Information Studies College* in Prague

Jan Machytka

Ladies and Gentlemen,
First of all, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak at this conference. The given theme - the education of librarians - is doubly a pleasure for me. I believe that the increased interest of the professional public in this topic is not temporary, and that it hold a promise for the future as a route to solving the many problems that are likely to come up at this conference at many presentations beside this one. In the light of the representative sample of a broad spectrum of leading practicing librarians as well as theoreticians, we can only look forward to the viewpoints and conclusions reached at this seminar.

I will divide my presentation into two parts. First of all, I will attempt to highlight the main problems of education for librarians in the Czech Republic, as we perceive them at our school; and secondly, I will briefly introduce VOŠIS (Czech acronym to Information Studies College) to you, its development to date and its plans for the future.

I see the main problem of the current specialised education of librarians to be the need to respond to the development trends of the present-day society. I described my vision of future possibilities in more detail at last year's conference in Seč, so I will only very briefly summarise the main trend. We are witness to a continuous progress in the development of information technology, its penetration into the daily life of society, and a great increase in the demand for quantity as well as the quality in satisfying the demands for information. The managing of those trends by information service professionals will have a direct impact on the further development of society, as well as on the position of the current information professional in it. New information systems are evolving, as well as new types of information workplaces, and, of course, new kinds of user services, which consequently produce even higher demands on the qualification of employees in this field.

If we are talking about librarian education today, we primary think of the necessity of a demonstrable, continually growing quality of graduates at all levels of librarian education, as well as a well-developed system of life-long education of the staff, which for many of you is an even more important question. Without these two conditions fulfilled, libraries will not be able in the future to justify their role of the fundamental link in the transfer of information.

The role of our school is and will be to prepare qualified graduates for the work of rank-and-file library workers. Long practical experience, however, has shown that some trends that our school must face up to are in direct opposition to the above demands. It is necessary to publicly acknowledge the continuously decreasing interest in library science, the lower level of study programme applicants, and partially even the decreasing interest of new graduates in getting a job in libraries.

At first glance it seems that the only reason for all the problems is the demographic shift. This decade is characterised by yearly decreases in the number of graduates of elementary schools (in the last ten years, we are talking about tens of thousands of students). During that same period, the number of study positions offered has almost doubled. One can simply deduce that if the number of students is decreasing, then the number of suitable candidates from the population is also necessarily decreasing. Very few schools correlate the number of students accepted with this development, because sooner or later their "survival instinct" will drive them to act in a more business-like way, forcing them to accept applicants with lower academic standards, and subsequently more or less consciously lowering their demands in classes. Students with a lower predisposition to study, who before could not even dream of studying at a college, are now taking up their places in the programmes.

Consequently, the problem of a shortage of students is not as seriously felt in the higher levels of the school structure; in the area of integrated schools and apprentice training centres, however, it is devastating. In reality, the impact of this trend is catastrophic even in colleges, because schools lack good enough students to cope with study programmes and to an ever greater extent the schools have to make do with students who would be better suited for apprenticeship training.

The truth is that such unfavourable trends are on the rise. What was very negative for secondary library school was the boundless growth in the number of six- and eight-year grammar schools, because it effectively diverted academically minded students away from the school. Another unfavourable impact was the fact that after several decades of the existence of a secondary education for librarians, our school has "succeeded" in getting the attribute of a school where one could easily graduate without actually passing such subjects as mathematics, as if such subjects had no relevance to library science. Today such a background, which would facilitate the mastering of new technologies, is lacking in the employees of your institutions.

In this society there is a continuous decline in the evaluation of the status of the profession of librarian, compared with other professions. There are fewer and fewer children that follow in the footsteps of their parents. It is much more common that they choose our profession as one of the last possibilities available. I believe that this is telling us something.

The staff of our school has come to the conclusion that the battle to solve these problems within the current education system cannot be won, and that it is necessary to escape the vicious circle even if it involves some painful decisions. Believe me, such a decision was not easy. This was mainly because such a decision involved people and the security of their positions, and in such instances every solution is a difficult one.

In 1991 when it was still a secondary school for librarians, after taking into consideration all the available information, we spent many hours looking for the answers to basic questions about content, form, and the level of the future education of library workers. We decided to completely overhaul the content of career preparation, and even change its place in the hierarchy of training. We mainly drew on experience from abroad. We realized that the time when 14- to 18-year olds were to have received specialized training as librarians is gone for ever. At the end of the 21st century, it is unthinkable to try to establish professional specialisation of a future information specialist in students of that age group. It is an unsustainable waste of financial resources, because for a student at this age to comprehend the material taught, it is necessary to spend most of the time allotted on building the background knowledge that a student from the elementary school simply does not have. Because there is very little time left for the specialised part of the subject, the problems are radically simplified, and the graduate's professional knowledge thus acquired is for all practical purposes inadequate.

We believe that the education of a librarian must be defined on a new, qualitatively higher level, namely in the tertiary level of education. In the near future we will be living in a society where probably more that fifty percent of the population will continue in further study after completing secondary education. I believe that it would be a great mistake for the future not to take advantage of this opportunity and to not promote the preparation of specialised librarians to such a level. Imagine a situation where every second user of the library has university education, but library workers do not. That will certainly not contribute to the changes that we are all calling for. That is why it is so important to not only prepare new study programmes, but to also upgrade them to the tertiary level. This now is the task that our school is faced with and which we presume could gradually change the image of the profession of librarians, as well as allow them to participate in the new distribution of roles in the coming information society.

Unfortunately, things are not always as we would like them to be and certain stumbling blocks of state bureaucracy are overcome only with a complete and utter exertion of effort. I would like to briefly inform you about what we have achieved to date.

The creation of VOŠIS in 1992 was made possible thanks to the courageous stance of the Minister of Education, who was fully aware of the low proportion of university graduates in the Czech population, and the resolution of the problem saw namely in the development of tertiary non-university education programmes, which had not existed in the Czech Republic at all.

Thanks to his support and that of the Dutch partners on the team, within one year the project for the establishment of higher-education schools of non-university type was ready, and 12 secondary schools set off on their sorrowful pilgrimage.

In the beginning we assumed that if we describe the problems and their resolution, we would gradually convince some of the pessimists, and the battle over the concept of tertiary education would be won. Our greatest mistake during that phase was that we, even after decades in a centrally managed society, naively believed that when something is demonstrably right and commonly in existence in other parts of world, the battle is automatically won. Unfortunately, today we now know that even in a democratic society that often is not the case; often the determining circumstances are such that we common mortals with our limited views simply cannot comprehend.

This was the situation in 1996: in April the experiment of the colleges was nearing its successful completion, and the time when they could be established as institutional units was drawing near. In June of that year, we learned that the experiment actually was only verifying the possibility of renaming the existing post-graduation study programmes without setting up the appropriate institutional foundations. Even though it did not appear that way, the decision stilted further development for many years.

Over the course of two years, more than 170 schools of tertiary education of non-university type were established; in most cases with a few students, and attached to secondary schools, and as a replacement for the abolished post-graduation study programmes. For operational reasons, it was not possible to consider the separation between the secondary schools and tertiary education of non-university type. Our experience plainly showed that in order to fulfil the true aims of college education as a part of tertiary level education, it was essential to build the colleges as independent institutions, with numbers of students reaching the thousands, rather than the dozens. Only such large numbers allow for the real application - not only on paper - of all the advantages of the college education approach in teaching. The co-existence with secondary schools brings insurmountable difficulties in the area of personnel, operations and organization, and effectively keeps the school at the secondary level of education.

Our school set out in that direction in 1995. The planned reduction in the number of secondary school students for four consecutive years was gradually compensated for by students of college, which number 630 today.

After extensive preparations and the departure of the last of the secondary school students last year, we managed a transition to the modular structure of study programme, and applied a full-scale credit system of evaluation. Realising the importance of library services, we took the important step of developing a correspondence course for it, and we are currently preparing its distance-learning version of it. The response to a brief announcement of the existence of that programme at the Seč conference of librarians pleasantly surprised us, and we hope that the beginning of the 2001/2002 school year is far enough to give enough time for the MŠMT (Ministry of Education, Youth and Physical Education) to enter the programme into the network of schools.

As the first school in the Czech Republic, we have gained a quality award from EVOS, an independent judgement by a representative evaluating commission.

After over a year of preparation, the accreditation commission put our programmes on the agenda of its meetings on 13 and 14 June 2000, where it is to assess the programmes' content and possibilities of implementation.

In the autumn months we expect a finalisation of the accreditation of our study programmes by the Irish post-secondary school in Slig. This would bring to a successful end the three-year process of efforts to attain the right to bestow our graduates with the title of Bachelor according to the EU regulations. In 2002, definitely before our entry into the EU, the first graduates in the field of library services at our school could boast a certificate of college learning recognised all over Europe.

Even now many of our students spend a part of their studies abroad. Because we are not a university and foreign post-secondary schools require tuition to be paid in the case of study stays, we concentrated mainly on organising work-study programmes for the 3rd- and 4th- year students. In the last school year, our students spent a total of 336 weeks abroad in work-study programmes; this year there are already 392 weeks all but confirmed.

Reciprocally, although in a more modest way, we are organising work-study programmes for foreign students in the leading workplaces. Last year we managed a total of 36 weeks; for next year we are expecting 124 weeks. The extent of our international co-operation may best be illustrated by the fact that in the past three years, our school ranked first in the number of projects supported by the EU through the Leonardo Fund programme.

Our school is convinced, just as it was eight years ago, that the right direction for the future development is the creation of a new institution offering the fundamental qualifications for the field at the level of Bachelor's studies. This aim cannot be fulfilled by universities because the requested number of graduates, if they are to fully replace the secondary school leavers, is beyond their capabilities. Under the present circumstances, colleges cannot, on their own, offer study programmes leading to the Bachelor degree. While the new Universities Act allows for the establishment of new non-university institutions, it restricts that possibility for the private sector only. Because we all know that a position of a librarian is not and probably never will be a very profitable, and those students capable of paying tuition of 30,000 to 40,000 CZK are very few, I consider the setting up of such an institution to be unrealistic. The Universities Act does not even consider the possibility of making universities from fully subsidized institutions. Paradoxically, under the social democratic government, a new level of the education system has been set up and is already being filled, it consists, however, of private institutions only. In the last two years we have lead endless discussions, with varying degrees of success, on the solving of this problem.

In closing, let me express my conviction in the fact that our school is well prepared for its new tasks. It has developed programmes for full-time and distance students at the Bachelor's level. It has the necessary capacity both in personnel, in operations and finance. The institutional and legislative resolutions, however, are beyond our control, so for now I cannot give you any more detailed information about the next steps, as we would all have certainly wished.

* College in the sense of tertiary education of non-university type. Back to the text