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Library and Information Services

SI faculty member Karen M. Drabenstott chaired the LIS specialization working group composed of Richard M. Dougherty, Joan C. Durrance, C. Olivia Frost, David W. Hessler, Maurita Holland, Victor Rosenberg, Thomas P. Slavens, Margaret T. Taylor, and Amy J. Warner, SI faculty; Lee Liming, ITS manager (now no longer with the School); Carolynn Miller, Gail Beaver, Elaine K. Didier, SI adjunct faculty; and Paul Lefrak, SI master's-level student. The working group drafted a curriculum plan describing this specialization.

The School of Information will continue to offer a strong, accredited, masters-degree professional program for librarians and related information professionals. The intent of the working group has been to revise, reorganize, and reinvent the library and information services curriculum starting from the foundation of the curriculum of the former School of Information and Library Studies and the experience of prototyping entirely new courses, making substantial changes to existing courses, and offering a new, combined core curriculum.

Faculty intend to retain the principles and concepts which are universal to library and information services, add to these as required by new environments, technologies and opportunities, and propose new ways of delivering all of this material. The group's curriculum plan proposes a model of the field that consists of the areas of creation, evaluation, selection, organization, retrieval, access to information, management, research tools, and ethics and values. Students in the LIS specialization would begin their program with Foundations, and proceed with the combined core course, and elective courses in one of more of the areas above. Courses would as much as possible focus on "environment neutral" techniques and phenomena, with issues specific to particular types of information environments being focused on in relevant applications areas.

Faculty have grown beyond looking at library practice as a set of specific tools and techniques, to looking at it as presenting a set of problems, with associated basic concepts and principles. The proposed LIS curriculum plan begins to sort these out, but is evolving even more in this direction. The challenge will be to obtain the proper balance between theory and concepts (specializations) and contexts and environments (applications areas). Basically, this amounts to important decisions about just what these "universal" principles are, about when to apply them, and about how to interface them with environment-specific elements introduced in the applications areas. These issues, however, go beyond just the Library and Information Services specialization and are relevant to the integration of knowledge from the LIS specialization to those of other SI specializations.

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