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Be All You Can Be in the Army Library Program

By Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow

In April, 120 Army librarians from around the world attended training sessions at a two-day workshop run by the GSLIS continuing education program. The training, held in a Department- of-Defense-leased building in Southbridge, Mass., focused on timely topics: evaluating library strengths, marketing, information literacy, and writing business cases.

"Libraries must sell their services, so marketing is important," says Ann Parham, the Librarian of the Army. "We need to be able to justify our budgets and demonstrate our value. Libraries, like most organizations, must be accountable for their funding."

Parham oversees the Army Library Program (ALP), a network of 200 libraries, including public (called "general" in the Army world), academic, medical, scientific/technical, and other special libraries in the United States and abroad, which are staffed by 300 civilian librarians. The Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps each have their own libraries.

Most of the overseas Army libraries are "general" and are for military personnel and their families who live on bases. "It's the company store," says Parham. The libraries are in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, and Korea — where U.S. troops have been stationed since WWII. Their collections tend to emphasize military art and science and defense-related subjects, but also include books for leisure reading and off-duty education. They also vary somewhat depending on the audience: A library in Heidelberg, Germany, for example, has a large number of books about the occupation of Germany after the war. There are no physical Army libraries in Iraq and Afghanistan, but troops there are sent boxes of paperback books selected by an Army office in Alexandria, Va., and shipped once a month.

Parham, who worked for more than 10 years as a librarian in Korea and Germany, says there are fewer Army libraries overseas today than when she started. But there are jobs internationally and in the United States. In particular, library school students with undergraduate degrees in science or technology could do well in these jobs. "Graduates with science and biomedical backgrounds make very competitive candidates, as that combination is difficult to find," she says. In the United States, the Army has about 12 libraries that support research laboratories staffed by chemists, physicists, and other scientists, as well as 40 medical libraries in hospitals and clinics that serve doctors and nurses. "There is always a need for librarians in these subject areas," she says.