Editorial: What Value Fellowships?

Instead of a gold watch to commemorate her 25 years on the job as director of Darien Library, CT, Louise Berry got a two-year, privately funded fellowship—not for herself but to hire a 2005 MLS graduate. The endowed fellowship sounds like the answer to the griping we've been hearing recently from many new MLS recipients and NextGen librarians and could be a model for other libraries. (To apply go to www.darienlibrary.org.)

Despite the call for new librarians to replace the graying professionals we've been told are, or will be, retiring in droves, MLS graduates tell us the jobs they were promised don't exist. Many are piecing together part-time gigs and barely making a living. Even those who are lucky enough to get full-time jobs often find beginning salaries woefully inadequate, especially as they pay off student loans. And that leadership track they've been sold is often mired in bureaucracy and resistance to change.

As Gabriel Farrell, an academic library employee who is also an MLS candidate at Pratt, wrote in Library Journal, "How will would-be professionals become skilled if they're denied the chance to work [their way up] through the system?" (LJ 1/05, p. 68).

That's why the Louise Parker Berry Librarian Fellowship is such a brilliant idea. Announced by former board chair Harold McGraw Jr. at Berry's 25th anniversary celebration last March, the fellowship was created by the trustees and Friends of the Darien Library. McGraw, chair emeritus of McGraw-Hill and a major donor to the New York Public Library, said, "[The fellowship] will provide a succession of two-year full-salaried positions to recent Master in Library Science recipients who demonstrate exemplary scholarship [and] show significant leadership promise…. [It] will extend the ideals that Louise Berry has championed…[including] library service to patrons and community beyond their expectations." (Full disclosure: Louise Berry is the wife of LJ's John Berry.)

Among the benefits of the fellowship are a livable wage, $45,416 in 2005 (the Connecticut Library Association [CLA] minimum salary for entry-level positions), paid membership in CLA and in the American Library Association (ALA), and funding to attend conferences like ALA annual. That alone would make the fellowship desirable, but there's much more: the opportunity to work with the staff at Darien, which has a reputation for "extreme customer service," to be in on the ground floor of a planned building project, as well as to manage projects, including budget and personnel responsibility.

For a relatively small library like Darien (population 19,600), the fellowship also responds to a concern Berry has: "How do we get new ideas, new blood, into a library with stable staff and low turnover?" Now, says Berry, "The rotation of recent grads will give us the most creative, best, and brightest library school graduates."

Another benefit of the program for Darien is the addition of staff without the need for additional tax support. "Money is always tight," says Berry. "We have all these ideas for new initiatives and never quite enough staff to go around." And she adds, "Pilot projects [like this] stimulate dedicated funding all the time." There is also the potential for such postgraduate fellowships to be funded by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has money earmarked for recruitment.

For the Fellows, the program offers the kind of work rarely entrusted to newbies. It makes them desirable, and at a higher level, for their next position. It shortens the path up the career ladder and puts them on the fast track to directorships. "It's a way to develop new leaders," says Berry. It's also a program worth emulating at libraries around the country.

fialkoff@reedbusiness.com