Order Matters: Typology of Dual-Degreed Law Librarians

Abstract

To a great extent law librarianship has regarded the dual-degreed librarian as too familiar and uncomplicated to merit extended attention. The present discussion challenges this assumed simplicity. The nature of professional education is to work on deeper personal levels to create a particular identity and to inculcate specific values necessary to the successful practice of the vocation. Such fundamental effects are neither easily erased nor superseded by a later professional indoctrination. Understood in this way, professional education produces an outcome that defies the commutative property. Order matters. Librarians who go to law school (i.e., “libyers”) should be discernible from lawyers who attend library school (“lawbrarians”), with consequences for the practice of law librarianship.

Using data describing members of the American Association of Law Libraries, this study tests the hypothesis that, given the fundamental levels at which professional enculturation operates, when an individual undergoes professional formation more than once the values of the first training regime will typically have the more profound impact on the general personality.

Keywords: Professional education, Identity