Introduction
Area of Special Emphasis - Transformational Change
As part of this presentation, the School of Information Sciences proposed to focus on transformational change to highlight how the School and its LIS curriculum are responding to the profound changes taking place in the profession.
One area of change has been the composition, the research areas of interest, and the teaching capabilities of the LIS faculty. In the period of 2006-2012, there has been significant turnover in the faculty due to retirements, illness and unexpected deaths, and resignations. During the period covered by this program presentation, the School has hired five new faculty members (including a new Program Chair for the LIS program) and a number of visiting faculty who have had a great impact on the program. Some of these appointments are quite unique for the School including the Mellon-funded Cyberscholar position currently held by Stephen Griffin, and Alison Langmead who was hired as a joint faculty appointment between the iSchool and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She serves both as the Director of the Visual Media Workshop in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and a Lecturer in the LIS Program, focusing her teaching for the iSchool in the archives and information management area. For Fall 2013, the School is recruiting four more faculty members including both junior and senior positions, one of which will hold primary teaching responsibilities in the LIS program. This new faculty member will add greatly to the evaluation and revision of the core curriculum to address contemporary needs of the professions.
Great changes have taken place in the Information Professions, particularly over the last decade. These changes have occurred, and are still transpiring, due to several factors including the evolving expectations of users, advances in technology, and a very uncertain economic climate. The School has sought the advice and expertise of alumni and practitioners regarding desired skills and knowledge in new graduates, new learning methodologies, and job opportunities in addition to those in libraries and archival facilities. With the addition of such input, the School will ensure that the MLIS curriculum is current and relevant in light of holistic changes in the library and archival professions.
The constant evolution of the Information Professions has impacted the curriculum of the MLIS program in several notable ways. For example, the growing amount of digitally-born records and information systems (as well as the increasing demand for enhanced access by researchers and the public to such records) and the digitization of analog records have generated more attention in the archival community to both digital curation and digital preservation. The School's archival specialization is responding to this with revisions to its curriculum by both adding new courses and revising others.
The Children's and Youth Specialization has responded to the changing landscape of Children's and Youth Librarianship in the 21st century by providing a structured program that integrates both new media and traditional children's literature into a cohesive curriculum.
In a decade of enormous change in health care, and at a time when the medical health information professional will be a team player in the evolving integrated health information environments, the Health specialization in the MLIS program provides exposure to knowledge-based resources and professional information services. The curriculum emphasizes the different information practices of health professionals who use knowledge-based information, as well as the traditional and electronic means by which health information is organized, stored, and retrieved. It also addresses the needs of and resources available to health care consumers, patients and families.
As the first opportunity for students to encounter the impacts of massive and networked digital content with their underlying global information infrastructure, the Information Technology and Digital Libraries specializations emphasize the transformative nature of information technology and digital content. Students are introduced to the profound effect of an overwhelming amount of data and sophisticated network systems on the library and archival fields, the professions, and the practitioners whose careers will involve continuous learning and training with these tools. The goal of these two specializations is to provide foundational knowledge and training to 21st century information professionals, permitting them to gain information technology skills and digital content manipulation experiences.
Contemporary research and scholarship is increasingly characterized by the use of large-scale datasets and computationally intensive tasks. Vast amounts of data are used to map the cosmos, build system models, examine structures of living organisms, and gain insights into the behaviors of societies and individuals in a complex world. Similarly, humanists are integrating newly digitized corpora, digital representation of cultural artifacts, spatial and temporal indexed data into their scholarly endeavors. The Denton Declaration: An Open Data Manifesto positions librarians and archivists at the center of the data management enterprise, while concepts of blended and embedded information professionals are leading to highly-specialized roles requiring deeper engagement in user workflows.
The School is responding to these developments in creative ways: already, the Mellon Cyberscholar has introduced a new course charting the development of digital scholarship, and a lecturer holding a joint appointment with the School of Arts & Sciences is enabling leading-edge expertise in visual media to be brought into the MLIS program. The present experiment (introduced in Fall 2012) of an embedded librarianship initiative within the MLIS is giving students direct exposure to emerging models of practice, while the current curriculum review is exploring the wider implications of a data-infused curriculum. Recent faculty appointments are resulting in new MLIS courses in citizen science and research methods during 2012-13, with curricular innovations in academic libraries and information history planned for 2013-14, as well as further enhancements arising from additional faculty appointments anticipated.
Students called for more opportunities to gain practical experience; this need was also indicated by employers who were looking for new staff with work experience in addition to the ALA-accredited degree. The School created the Partners Program and a series of specialized Field Experience courses to offer that invaluable experience to students.
In 2012, the School began the process to transition its online MLIS program to the University-hosted platform, Pitt Online. The School previously developed one of the pioneering online programs utilizing in-house systems to support distance education. Now that the University has developed a comprehensive online learning system, the MLIS program is being transitioned to Pitt Online. This will result in efficiencies in course delivery, improved user experiences, and the ability to more effectively incorporate collaborative tools into the learning experience. At this time, courses are being offered in both the new Pitt Online and the existing “blended” formats to make the transition as seamless as possible.
Perhaps the most significant transformational change is the creation and growth of the consortium of Information Schools – the iSchools. The School of Information Sciences was a founding member of this group and continues to play a significant role in the iSchool Caucus and the iConference. The iSchools view the Information Sciences as a discipline that attracts scholars and students from a broad range of disciplines to work together in understanding the nature and use of information. Being an iSchool not only recognizes and honors the separate fields that comprise the discipline, but also calls for melding these differing perspectives into a new whole. The iSchool at Pitt is evolving from a long history of excellence in more narrow disciplinary endeavors that touch all aspects of librarianship (including, but not limited to, children’s and youth services; academic, medical, and corporate librarianship; archives and records management); information systems design and analysis; information retrieval; telecommunications and networking; and cognitive science. Building bridges among academic programs of such diversity remains a challenge, but one that is being accomplished in order to thrive and grow as an iSchool, an academic and research unit that reflects the multi-faceted nature of information, technology and people.