| Programmatic accreditation is the process whereby a professional group judges its educational programs against a set of consensually-derived norms, usually referred to as "standards." The American Library Association (ALA) currently evaluates first professional degree programs in library and information science according to its 1972 Standards for Accreditation. Using the 1972 Standards, ALA's Committee on Accreditation (COA) has evaluated 72 such programs between January 1973 and July 1985. The purpose of the present study was to discover the extent to which COA found these library and information science degree programs to have embodied the professional values inherent in the 1972 Standards. The units of analysis for the study were the formal, numbered recommendations found at the end of each COA report.;Results of the first research question indicated that library schools have been most seriously deficient in the areas of Curriculum and Faculty, followed (in descending order) by Governance, Facilities, Goals & Objectives, and Students. Second research question results indicated that issues relating to Students took a dramatic upswing between the first and second accreditation rounds, while the other Standards retained much the same relative position as in the aggregate findings of the first research question.;The researcher obtained a 93.4% sample of all formal COA recommendations made to library schools during this period. Using the methods of content analysis, she sorted these 2,086 recommendations into 120 partially predetermined and partially emergent subject categories. Absolute and relative frequency analyses were used to determine the number and percentage of recommendations in each category for the entire period under investigation (first research question); trend comparison was used to measure changes in recommendation patterns between first (1973-1976) and second (1978-1985) accreditation rounds under the 1972 Standards (second research question). Although results were displayed for all 120 categories, the investigator concentrated on those that received one percent or more of the 2,086 recommendations. |
