Knowledge Bases and Library Education

Abstract

A continuing topic of debate among research library administrators and library educators is whether graduate library education adequately prepares librarians for the research library en-vironment. Unfortunately, there has been little research to identify specific knowledge needs of academic research librarians or how these needs change over the librarian's career. There also has been insufficient attention paid to what training library administrators must provide to supplement the graduate program as the librarian moves through a career that will span many years and countless changes. Therefore, randomly sampled ARL librarians were asked to rate fifty-six knowledge bases according to how important they were and the degree to which they possessed each knowledge. hile there is no shortage of views and opinions in the pro-fession regarding what is lack-ing in the educational prepara-tion of librarians for research libraries, there is little research on which to base