The director of Human Resources for Anchorage has changed the requirements for the position of Director of Libraries. The requirements no longer say a person must have a masters degree in library science.
The move by HR Director Niki Tshibaka is in part a response to a pilot project started at the library over a year ago. The Library division noted that candidates who had strong skill sets and diverse experiences were being excluded from jobs with the library. Libraries are now run by what is essentially a cartel of white middle-aged women.
At issue during the pilot project was equity, and making sure people working in the library may bring diverse backgrounds, skills, and cultural viewpoints. One of the reasons for the pilot project was that “Strong candidates who had skillsets and experiences applicable to the Library, but not directly in a library environment often did not make it through the HR screening, which led to more uniformity in hiring and hampered the Library’s ability to have a staff with diverse backgrounds and skills,” the Library management noted at the time.
Opening the hiring process to “more candidates with backgrounds outside of libraries . . . makes the candidate pool more diverse in terms of skillsets and cultural identities, because people with library experience tend to come from similar educational and cultural backgrounds[.]”
The Library also concluded that “[b]y having access to a broader range of applicants, the Library is able to discover hidden gems who bring new perspectives and skills to the Library team whom we might not have found otherwise[.]”
According to the Zippia website, 81 percent of librarians are white and most of those whites are women around the age of 48:
“64.1% of all librarians are women, while 30.5% are men. The average age of an employed Librarian is 48 years old. The most common ethnicity of Librarians is White (81.4%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (6.8%) and Black or African American (6.0%),” the employment website notes.
The number of Native Americans with library science masters degrees is so small that it’s not even documented. But in the 1990s, it was fewer than 200 in the entire nation.
The American Library Association and the Alaska chapter of that organization is stridently opposed to the hiring of those without a MLS degree. The association compares it to hiring a police chief who has no police experience.
Earlier this year, the Anchorage Assembly refused to confirm the mayor’s choice of Sami Graham as director of Libraries, even though she had extensive experience running schools, including the schools’ libraries. After that, Mayor Dave Bronson named Judy Eledge, a teaching professional, to the post; she also does not have a library science degree and later, when it became apparent the Assembly would not confirm her, she dropped back to the deputy librarian position. The Bronson Administration is now on a nationwide hunt for someone to run the Anchorage libraries.
The matter has become especially political because the Loussac Library had, under Mayor Ethan Berkowitz and unelected Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson, become a cesspool of drug users, drag queen story time for children, and people browsing porn on the internet.
Since her appointment, Eledge has worked to clean up the libraries and make them safe for children again, much to the dismay of the nine liberal members on the Assembly who oppose the Bronson Administration.
Would you want a family doctor performing heart surgery?
Frank, are you REALLY trying to compare being a librarian to being a surgeon?
If so, your radical leftist ignorance and abject stupidity just sank to a new low.
Like many other things this seems odd. Job reclassification before or after recruitment and hire(s)? Art?
This isn’t technically a reclassification but rather just a change in the class specification to change the minimum qualifications. It’s very common if you have difficulty recruiting for a particular class. We changed the specs and minimum qualifications for our professional staff in State labor relations several times during my tenure. From what I can see it is an exercise of a legitimate employer prerogative. When I was with the State we went to the AK Supreme Court to protect our right to determine job classifications and qualifications unilaterally without union involvement. That said, I’m sure the communists can find a judge who’d like to perform a great service in the hope of being appointed to a higher court by a Democrat or fake independent Governor who’ll conclude that there was a discriminatory motive or some such, so I hope the Mayor walked into this prepared to go to the Supreme Court.
Library Science………………….what stupid and useless major. All those with degrees in this could die tomorrow and civilization wouldn’t even notice. Hell anyone with a HS diploma and knack for organization could run a library.
But that candidate with a HS diploma and a knack for organization wouldn’t be able to show that they had been accepted as a member of an exclusive club, the nature of which nobody involved wants to talk about because to articulate the qualification the lefties on the Assembly are really looking for would be illegal.
Looks like there are a lot of people commenting here who don’t spend much time at the library.
Well then, Homo, get to the library!
So if you are black, you don’t need an MLS to run the library, but if you’re white, you do? Or you don’t need an MLS in any case?
This doesn’t pass the smell test. This is an attempt to get around the MLS requirement, which is considered standard for library directors pretty much everywhere, so Bronson can put whoever he wants into the position and, thus, “own the libs.” The characterization of librarians is a laughably lame attempt at some imaginary sense of equality. If black women, or men, want to be librarians, they can do so by getting the proper credentials.
What are the credentials for becoming HR Director in Anchorage? I don’t know, but apparently doing the mayor’s dirty work is one of them.
As an aside, it appears the two women who were selected as candidates, and dismissed because they didn’t have the proper MLS degree, generally fit into the stereotype of the 81% majority of librarians. So much for the fake diversity issue.
So after running off two highly qualified Bronson appointees due to lack of MLS degrees, the HR people suddenly decide MLS is no longer an issue.
Anchorage is so screwed. So very screwed.
10 years from now the city will long for the “sane” days of 2021.
What, no more white, leftist, wokeist, elitist toxic femininity from The People’s Democratic Republic of Anchorage library czarina? The horrors!
I think the secret is out…and the results are obvious: the progressive white woman is destroying America.
“The American Library Association and the Alaska chapter of that organization is stridently opposed to the hiring of those without a MLS degree.”
So this is how the cartel screens out the unwashed? It begs the question of what life-defining skills are obtained through an MLS? Advanced Dewey Decimal? Non-Housed User Management? Maintaining Restrooms for Multi-Use Functions? Transgender Identity Accomodation?
I support Judy Eledge and her good work in cleaning up the Anchorage libraries. I’ve used the Loussac computer lab and was completely outraged by pornographic searches going on there when unelected Austin Quinn-Davidson was in charge.
Fake news, the library was closed to the public for much of that time. Amazing how no one wants to talk about the difficulties in accessing local history resources and freely disseminating resources which are in the public domain, a problem of much longer standing than the cited issues. The public have shown themselves to be content with merely consuming content instead of being eager to learn, so it’s really not all that surprising.
Is drag queen story hour and sexually explicit propaganda aimed towards children also “fake news”?
Thank you Niki
This permissive characteristic lessening restrictive higher education requirement is an encouraging action toward increased equity
Yup. Pretty soon you won’t need any “restrictive” qualifications for anything, and the whole country can be run by people who have no education, expertise, experience, or clue as to what they are doing.
Sounds to me like some people’s definition of freedom.
Give it back to the chick that had the position that they fired for not having it.
If you could go to the old Dewey Decimal System in the local library and do a subject matter search for “older, liberal, white woman,” you would be directed to all books on communism.
Zippia’s numbers don’t add up – neither in gender or ethnicity… Makes one wonder why libraries are such a mess. A public library should be a place safe from politics and indoctrination and quotas.
Lmao what makes you think it ever could be safe from that?
That’s why the MLS degree exists, in order to gatekeep a certain ideology that will curate the selection of information your community is allowed to read.
I was a volunteer at the library (different town) for years. I brought my values and loved every minute of it. It’s unbelievable to me that nice people fight over libraries and librarians. I can understand arguments about curriculum materials chosen for schools though.
Liberal double standards and arrogance, as usual. Not that conservatives are never guilty of having double standards. Neither should have them. But we all know if a professional organization or some pilot project said overtly that they thought affirmative action and identity politics were counterproductive, the liberal professors, media and other liberal professional organizations and wikipedia would call the organization “far right” and accuse the organization of making things political when politics shouldn’t be involved and pandering to right wing politics, etc etc. But if an organization says the word “equity” and starts to lower standards so they can hand pick more colors that they want for their virtuous rainbow that perversely somehow shows to them they see deeper than skin color, they are just following “the science”. Then, if you get into the details about why that isn’t science or compassion or whatever they think it is using real data and logic, then all they hear is someone trying to justify their already held beliefs and call you a bigot, which if they spent 2 seconds being honest with themselves they would see how that applies to themselves and should stop and listen and encourage the discussion. I’ll tell you, if there is only one side that has patience right now, it’s the right and I think we need to stop having it. They are mistaking it for people that don’t have firm ground to stand on.
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Oh and of course, as usual, this liberal virtue signaling cares about getting all of the perspectives into the mix with equal opportunity except the ones that oppose them.
I’ve got a diverse skill set & am a minority x 2. Since most surgeons are white men, am I now a potential candidate?
So once the Politburo brought down two qualified candidates over lack of an MLS, they lower the standards? In a bigoted attempt to not hire white people!
Typical.
It’s not white people that the communists want to exclude; they have another definition of inclusivity.
Well, they (cartels) are a thing…
Why are these people so obsessed with who runs the library? Could it be, perhaps, that they intend to use libraries as one avenue for indoctrinating our youth?
That’s exactly it. Just read the other article about transgender kids books, and extrapolate that out to the public.
It’s about the control of information, and the nationwide cartel of “librarians” wishes to act in lockstep.
No one needs a degree to do this job. You scan ISBN barcodes and put the book where it belongs.
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