Guest Editorial: Life in the minor leagues; or, Crash Davis finds happiness

1 Although I had heard it then, I had forgotten just how effectively he made the case for college librarianship. Many of the ideas I had been considering Moffett had more eloquently communicated six years ago. Yet, these ideas deserve repeating from a slightly different perspective. In his address, Moffett lamented the status of college librarianship. He found library literature dominated by editors and writers associated with the concerns of larger institutions. Both private and public funding agencies almost invariably favored very large institutions. Even within ALA and ACRL he found a decline in the status of the college library. Moffett concluded, ''Being small in American academia means having to endure the nagging sense of being in the minors." To many, college librarianship is not the big leagues. Following this analogy, I have perceived an assumption among some librarians from larger institutions that college librarians would love to move up to the major leagues (or the ''Big Show'' as the character Crash Davis called it in the quintessential baseball movie, Bull Durham), if only they could. There is an expectation that the appropriate career path for professional fulfillment is to bigger libraries. Some college librarians share this expectation. Most, however, find the challenges within the college library quite satisfying. I am concerned that too many library school graduates do not understand the rewards of college librarianship and succumb to the temptation to follow only the university model. In recent years college librarians have been strongly encouraged to publish more. Certainly increased publication has its desirable aspects. When, however, publication in the professional literature becomes a self-serving career advancement step made at the expense of more important accomplishments, then publication is not such a good idea. Ironically, librarians frequently bemoan the growth in the number of journals and their increased costs in other disciplines, but we need to examine our own periodicals. By one count, fifteen library and information science periodicals have started just within the past two years. Do we really benefit from all these journals, or do they exist mainly to provide places in which librarians can publish to get tenure and to move up the career ladder? Perhaps college librarians are less represented in the professional literature not because they lack the talent, but because they have less · pressure to publish to validate what they do. Publication is only one of many ways college librarians can contribute …