Education for Library and Information Science Professionals

Abstract

Libraries and information centers today are very different places from those that existed at the beginning of the 20th century, and very different as well from the libraries of only 25 years ago. Education for library and information science has striven to keep pace with all the myriads of changes. Within the last 100 years, fortunately and necessarily in order to retain its relevance, professional library education and practice has evolved from the centrality of teaching and writing the “library hand” to providing modern curricula such as services for distance learners and Web-based instruction using course management systems such as Blackboard, WebCT, and so forth. Along the way, the library profession has often been first not only to accept but also to adopt and apply the technological innovations now common to modern civilization. One of the newest trends involves the “I-Schools” where information is taught as the overarching discipline with librarianship just one of the programs in a larger college offering programs in informatics, information science, information architecture, knowledge management, and so forth. Throughout, library and information science educators have paved the way to the acceptance of innovation in libraries and information centers by instructing students to use and apply new technologies.