Education for Information

This paper offers an impressionistic assessment of the major centripetal and centrifugal forces recontouring the landscape of information studies education. The focus is North America, though some of the trends described find their echo in other contexts. The paper considers the health of the field in terms of its (a) critical mass, (b) coherence, (c) credibility, and (d) creativity, and speculates on its likely future constitution.

This paper describes the situation of library and information education in the six member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), located in the Middle East. Data were collected through a mailed instrument from six schools located in three countries of the region that offer degree programs. Five of the six programs are essentially undergraduate. Three schools reported that they were revising their curriculum and one school had recently completed the process. Little change in their curricula was noted in these schools. The student-faculty ratio in all the schools is satisfactory. Intake and dropout rates in four of the six schools are alarmingly high. Four of them are extremely deficient in technological resources. Little application of computing hardware, software, bibliographic utilities and automated systems was found in four of the six schools. There is a real paucity of monographic and periodical resources in the majority of schools. Fieldwork was found to be a norm as a graduation requirement in these schools. The findings can be generalized to a number of developing nations that have similar conditions of library and information education and employment markets.

The changing environment of academic libraries in Pakistan demands new competencies for future academic librarians. This study defines and validates competencies for entry-level professionals keeping in view the needs of the next five years. Top-level library managers of selected universities and post-graduate level colleges participated in the study. A scale of perceived importance of each competency was used for validation of competencies organized in six categories: management, resource development, technical service, reference & information services, information technology and general. A distinct preference is noted for information technology competencies. A significant overlap between the opinion of public and private sector librarians is also observed. The validated competencies can be used for the evaluation and revision of the curricula of formal education programs.

Based on the concept of the NORDIC academic cooperation model (NorFa), in 1998-2000 Danish and international information scientists initiated a co-operative effort to build an education and research network among LIS institutions in South Africa. The paper reports the successful completion of the project, with 20 MA and Ph.D. students selected equally from the traditional “black” and “white” universities of the country. The participants coined their own name, DISSAnet, which stands for Development in Information Science in South Africa. It is intended that DISSAnet will continue to exist after the end of the project and that the network should function as a platform to support professional development and internationalisation in the LIS field. It is planned to arrange courses and seminars within the network and to make the ProLISSA conferences a regular, biannual regional event.