describing competency in library literature: hints of things to come

I’ve been blabbing on about competency for a while along with the question of what constitutes an academic librarian. I’ve now started collecting data for an article describing the research literature on this topic, eventually looking at how we as librarians publish regarding competency (versus the business literature). I’m curious to know who publishes the most scholarly and non-scholarly articles, what kind of librarians are publishing these articles and eventually how competency is used in the scholarly literature. I’m also trying to let the literature speak for itself to identify trends in how the library world deals with this topic with respect to journal literature.

My initial assumptions when I started this research included: competency is a concept broadly applicable across all dimensions of library science and should, theoretically, fall within all the domains (not just "professional issues") expounded in the article by Koufogiannakis, Slater and Crumley (2004); that all domains would exist within the academic/college/university arena (subset of roughly 456 hits incompletely weeded); that definitions of competency may be roughly equivalent to behavioural competency (USA), occupational competency (UK) or holistic (a few EEC countries) as described in Le Deist and Winterton's article (2005) and; that the roots of competency in library science are in the business literature and a compare and contrast is necessary to test the maturity of competency (issues) our field in comparison to the business field and to illuminate where and how we differ in our dealings with this concept.

What will I test for in the bigger picture? My suspicion is that when I go to look at the largest search set comprising competency in all libraries, approx. 977 not weeded or as yet unverified (not yet removed book reviews, abstracts, editorials, conference reports), the majority of all peer-reviewed articles published will be by academic librarians and regarding competencies of staff in academic libraries. My suspicion is that the majority of articles published regarding competency in special libraries will be non-scholarly. Don’t forget, I haven’t delved into standards, guidelines, reports and studies such as the Canadian 8Rs study or SLA’s Information Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21st Century, these two applicable to all types of libraries and librarians.

The largest search set of scholarly articles, as yet unconfirmed, is the academic search set, as “suspicioned” above. There are approximately 456 articles, as yet unverified (not yet removed book reviews, abstracts, editorials, conference reports for ALL years). The earliest article retrieved regarding academic libraries was published in 1968 in College and Research Libraries. It should be noted that in the business literature, Rothwell and Lindholm (1999) discuss the precursors of competency (Flanagan, 1954) and the foundations of competency modelling starting in 1959 (White) in the United States.

In order to test my methodology (data collection) I am focussing on only one year. Interestingly, my initial results show that the majority of peer-reviewed or scholarly research articles regarding academic/universit*/colleg* were published in 2003 with initial results of around 61 scholarly hits but only 49 peer-reviewed articles. There is no beautiful bell curve getting me there (based on hits), the numbers for each year go up and down making me wonder what external factors pushed publishing, if any. For instance, what standards, guidelines or statements regarding best practice were published that might have pushed article publication? Of these 49 articles, so far the majority are on the topic of information literacy but I’m still printing them. I’ll know for sure soon enough.

The most articles published on this topic in 1993 were in the following journals: five in Reference Services Review, with volume 31(4) containing three of these articles; four articles in Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, three of these in 44(4) and; five articles were also published in the Reference Librarian, four in issue 81 alone. Consider these our top three publishers in 2003, for what it is worth.

Interestingly, when Koufogiannakis et al did their study on library literature for 2001, the "top" journals were College & Research Libraries and JASIST "as major sources of library research...that are valuable for their cross-disciplinary content" (2005: 235). The "top" journals for the 457 hits, partially weeded academic searchset are: Journal of Academic Librarianship (37), Reference Services Review (35) and College & Research Libraries (29). All the other titles had 16 or less hits. It will be interesting to see what the totals really are after removing non-peer items and non-articles from the search set.




Bundy, M. L. , & Wasserman, P. (1968). Professionalism reconsidered. College & Research Libraries, 21(1), 5-26.

Koufogiannakis, D. , Slater, L. , & Crumley, E. (2004). A content analysis of librarianship research. Journal of Information Science, 30(3), 227.

Le Deist,F. D., & Winterton, J. (2005). What is competence? Human Resource Development International, 8(1), 27.

Rothwell, W. J., & Lindholm, J. E. (1999). Competency identification, modelling and assessment in the USA. International Journal of Training and Development, 3(2), 90-105.

Special Committee on Competencies for Special Librarians. Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21st Century. Revised edition. S.l.: Special Libraries Association, 2003. Accessed 22 February, 2006: http://www.sla.org/content/learn/comp2003/index.cfm