The Politics of Professionalism

This book presents a retro-progressive proposal for the education of librarians: the removal of library education from the jurisdiction of universities which in recent decades have become increasingly corporatized internalizing market-based concepts such as performance metrics and audit culture to the extent that ideologically speaking they are indistinguishable from corporations. The author presents a detailed alternative model for library education building upon Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of a librarian as a professor of books.