ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Letter

UCB’s Bibliography 1 course

To the editor:

On page 352 of your July/August 1985 issue there is a highly inaccurate story about the Bibliography 1 course given in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California in Berkeley. I want to correct those inaccuracies.

1. The Board of Regents did not reduce the credits for the Bibliography 1 course at Berkeley. It was not involved in any way.

2. The course was reviewed by the school’s faculty who found it to be inadequately related to bibliography and the purpose of the course and who proposed revisions to give it greater bibliographic direction. They concluded that the revised content warranted two units of credit rather than three, an assessment responsibility assigned to members of the faculty senate.

3. The University will give teaching assignment preference first to Ph.D. candidates and campus librarians, and second to others, as it has for the past nine years, contrary to your report that this is new. In fact a number of others usually receive teaching assignments in Bibliography 1 and that will be true again this year in the revised format.

Reform and improvement in education are difficult at best in a profession inherently reluctant to change. The filing of labor practice complaints makes the process of change all the more difficult and costly, increasing the odds against institutional improvement.

The situation with Bibliography 1 at Berkeley, is, therefore, substantially different from the report carried in your journal.—Bichard P. Hafner Jr., Public Affairs Officer, University of California, Berkeley.