What's in a name?

Women librarians have made great strides in recent years. According to Deyrup (2004), more than 50% of library leaders (top administrators; library directors) are women. This is significant in that in 1991, women made up 80% of the library workforce, yet 80% of the library administrators were men (Kauffman, 1993). Moreover, there are scholars (e.g., Zemon & Bahr, 2005) who claim that there are cases where the salaries of female directors exceeds that of the male directors. So, the issues surrounding the "disadvantaged majority" (i.e., women librarians) is over, right? Not so fast. While scholars such as Cassell and Weibel (2007) suggest that there are bigger issues today, there remains the image problem that has been plaguing libraries since the 1940s (O'Brien, 1983).

The image problem has recently reared its ugly head at Rutgers University. At that institution, the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies is trying to remove the term "library" from its name. Some graduates, like Mary Chilton, a professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College (CUNY), are not happy about this move and state that they will not support it. In fact, Chilton claims the following:

It sounds as if the Dean really wants to say that librarians are female and poor and mostly wedded to a diminishing public sector, and SCILS wants private money and therefore has to appeal to private money biases, or to academic administrators who share these biases, all the while reaping the headcount of the MLIS students.

Chilton continues to suggest that should the name change be approved, she would like a "divorce" from her program. It appears that the presence of a female majority continues to taint the term "library." Maybe all women librarians who graduated from programs that remove "library" from its name should take similar action. Just a thought.

Despite the advances women have made in libraries, we cannot allow them to lull us into a false sense of security and mask the gender-related problems that still exist.