Christina and Meg point to the defensiveness of the reviewers of the journals that have reviewed their ideas. It seems that apart from the academic evaluations of the peer reviewers about the approach of these two researchers, we are faced with a sense of ownership of information institutions that does not easily cope with an obvious reality. The fact is that not all graduates of information schools are capable of managing all jobs in the field of information. There is a wide range of people who are not interested in jobs in the field of information and do not have the same professional skills. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that taking any job in the information field by Information Science graduates will necessarily lead to the best professional performance and the highest user satisfaction.

The reason for this weakness can be easily understood. Each specialized field consists of multiple layers of knowledge and skills. From the point of view of curriculum planning, various subjects can be placed in the layers of the curriculum and equip the student with what s/he needs to succeed in the job market. In the center layer, core or main subjects can be found (required subjects). Learning these subjects is mandatory, and no specialist can be hired without basic knowledge in these required subjects. The next layer consists of those specialized subjects that do not play as decisive a role as the first layer, but knowing them can help the specialist succeed in the job market (specialized optional subjects). The third layer includes elective subjects that have a supportive role.

Let’s imagine that we have another adjacent specialized field. Suppose these two fields are Information Science and Management. Subjects of the third level of the Information Science curriculum are actually the core subjects, or the first layer of Management. As a result, the student of Information Science gets acquainted with a not-so-deep section of the core subjects of Management.

Now one can understand the philosophy of Christina and Meg’s logical questions. They mention jobs that do not require the core knowledge and skills of Information Science. Although a librarian knows some things about a given job description and may have experience in that field, a graduate of another field can handle these tasks more successfully. S/he has already acquired deep theoretical knowledge and sufficient practical skills in that field, and compared to a librarian, s/he has more professional qualifications.

Let’s expand the discussion beyond the example of a career position at the ALA and extend this feature of curricula to all information careers. There are a variety of responsibilities in libraries and information centers. Acquisition and organization of information resources, face-to-face and remote information services, management of databases and information systems, developing web sites, administrating content management systems, and even content production are among the tasks that librarians are currently performing. The implementation of some of these tasks is based on adequate and deep training in iSchools. However, some of these tasks can be performed better by the graduates of, for example, Computer Science, Journalism and other fields.

In fact, we have a permanent conflict in the curriculum planning of Information Science and determining its true territory. Figure 1 shows the matrix that simplifies matching of Information Science education with the needs of the market in four cells: perfect concordance, perfect inconcordance, inconcordance from the university side, and inconcordance from the profession side. The best case, which is unlikely to be realized, is perfect concordance. In this case, the graduate performs all assigned tasks perfect. On the other hand, the worst case is perfect inconcordance, in which the graduate is not able to handle any of the assigned tasks. This is a complete failure for the university. The next scenarios are inconcordance from the university or profession sides. If the libraries have an up-to-date and standard situation in relation to the industry, they are ahead of the university, and the university curricula are not consistent with their needs. However, if the university’s synchronization speed with the technology is faster than the speed of libraries, part of the knowledge and skills learned will remain unused in the job market.

Figure 1. Professional Qualifications Matrix

In general, Information Science education has experienced this conflict always. It has been less in developed countries. However, it has never been resolved. It seems that this conflict is normal in that it can help both the university and the profession to increase their efforts to adapt to the other party and help improve the quality of services. Let’s think more about Christina and Meg’s idea.