Sunday, March 05, 2006

I spent some time browsing through the discussion papers at the Gorman/ALA LIS Education Forum that took place in January. The spirit of collaboration (or am I being wishful here?) that seemed to have been a part of the discussions is very encouraging. Although the news such as students lacking basic writing and bibliography skills is sad :(. Gail Dickinson, a reactor, commented on the myths and rituals in librarianship. These are quite provocative as it makes me wonder what exactly are these myths and what part, if any, they might have had in the almost 100-years of LIS education bashing in the United States. Yes, surprising isn't it that practitioners are angry with LIS educators for 100 years - it's sort of documented in this article: Educating and training library practitioners: a comparative history with trends and recommendations - includes appendix on history of library education (see the section on Is something wrong with library schools? p. 6) Back to Michael's forum discussion 10 has requested a wiki for sharing resources and curricula - wouldn't an OAI-PMH compliant archive be better for that? Resources could be aggregated and made more easily searchable through services like DL-Harvest. On yet another note: I wonder if the LIS wiki could be used - especially the LIS education pages to write collaborative documents on conflicted issues and possibly, maybe arrive at a consensus. Or position papers could be deposited in an OAI-PMH compliant open access archive like dLIST along with formal commentaries (as papers in same archive) plus informal comments in a wiki. See the Stoffle and Leeder article on Practitioners and Library Education as an example of using an archive. It was responding to Dillon and Norris Crying Wolf, which in turn was responding to Gorman's Whither Library Education (Microsoft .doc file). Incidentally, the first two were published in JELIS, an ALISE publication. As usual, technology offers many choices but its the socio-political moves that are hard to figure out, coordinate and implement. comment []3:50:47 PM

© Copyright 2006 Anita S. Coleman. Last update: 4/22/2006; 7:11:23 AM.