The Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship Program: Enhancing the LIS Professoriate

Abstract

With the aid of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity offered the first full fellowships under the Spectrum Scholarship program for 12 students to pursue doctoral degrees in Library and Information Science at accredited institutions around the country. The Fellows were drawn from the four underrepresented ethnic populations and are in various stages of study from early course work to near completion of their doctoral degrees.With the goal of increasing racial and ethnic diversity among the profession’s next generation of Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty and leaders, the program has provided an unprecedented opportunity for the scholars. It has also created the ability to extract a wealth of information from the scholars about their experiences as doctoral students. The major goal of this research is to capture that information, especially the advantages and disadvantages those students experienced both as Fellows and as minority students in LIS PhD programs. The results of this research will inform LIS education and pedagogy and provide documented evidence of experiences that can lead to the improvement of doctoral education for minorities in the future and enrich the knowledge on which future initiatives are based.