Is it necessary to earn a degree in Library Science in order to be hired as a librarian at a public library?

I live in small town and I know people working at our library who are still in high school. I don’t know if they’re actual librarians or they just do odd jobs/restock books. If you’re going to be a “head librarian” or something like that, I’m sure you’d need a degree.

To answer your second question, I really don’t think they do. That’s a problem I have with today’s society: more and more jobs that shouldn’t require degrees are requiring degrees, leaving us with people who aren’t using much of the knowledge acquired in their degree and don’t stand a chance at paying off a student loan with their job (no offense to librarians or anything).

To answer your question, I suspect they don’t HAVE to, but their competition HAS it.

And the reason why your mother’s gen doesn’t have one is because it was RARE in those days. Likewise computer programming degrees before the 70’s.

These days, you need an MSL to get anywhere in the profession.

My wife is a librarian and yes, to get hired AS A LIBRARIAN, you need an MLIS degree from a fully accredited university. However there are page and clerk jobs you can get with a high school diploma. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the person who checks out your books is a librarian btw, usually they are clerks. The people who shelve the books are shelvers and/or pages. The librarians do sometimes check the books out to patrons, but their core function is more research and development. They are the people who develop the collections and the cataloging systems, they are the ones who weed through old books and purchase new ones, they are the ones who answer the questions that people bring to them off the street, the ones who help the people get set up to use the library computers, the people who run the reading programs, kids programs, etc. If you want to shelve books, bring things from place to place and check some books out to patrons, you can do that with almost no education, though depending on how stiff the competition is for jobs, how much education and experience it will take to get hired varies. Basically what I see is even after you get a Master’s Degree (an MLS is a Master of Library Science, and MLIS is a Master of Library and Information Sciences), which is a 5 to 6 year degree, you still need to get about a year experience (which most get by subbing, i.e. just like teachers, a Librarian calls in sick or goes on sub hours, there’s a pool of degreed Librarians to fill the spot) before most places will hire you as a “Librarian”. Anyone older who is not a page and is actually a Librarian may have gotten into the profession at a time when this type of education was not necessary, but you have to realize they have years, probably decades of life experience doing the very things an education would teach them about.

Edit: Typo strikes again. I meant, of course, MLS (Masters of Library Science).

Being a librarian at the public library is a governmental position in our town (as I expect it is in most towns). In order to apply for the position of librarian, you do indeed need an MLS. However, you can get a job in a library as a clerk of some sort.

Our librarian at the city museum I used to work for had 20 years experience working as a librarian but was still unable to transfer over to the equivalent position with precisely the same duties in the public library because she did not have an MLS. Once she got that degree, however, she was hired at our local university as a librarian.

Great question and I had no idea about the difference in librarians and pages and clerks!