Developing A Digital Libraries Education Program: JCDL 2006 Workshop Report

spacer
Indiana University Bloomington (IU) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered a full-day workshop aimed at digital library professionals, researchers, and educators to cover prominent issues surrounding digital libraries education. It is one of the activities of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded collaborative digital library education project (http://lair.indiana.edu/research/dlib/index.php). This is the second year of a three-year project, with a digital library workshop or conference in each of the three years. We have spent the past year recruiting our first classes of Digital Library Fellows, learning about the requirements of the digital library profession, and developing new courses. The workshop built upon a similar workshop at last year's Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and brought together a number of speakers on topics of interest to digital library educators and working professionals. The workshop, attended by approximately 35 participants, brought together IU and UIUC students, faculty, and librarians, other IMLS grant recipients, and representatives from digital library programs in other countries to report on project details, including requirements analysis, curriculum development, and program evaluation. Recurring themes included the balance between theory and practice in the digital library curriculum, the relationship between computer science and library and information science in the education of digital librarians, and the importance of providing internships in working digital library programs.