Vision for Century 2

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Future of the Library and Information Professions

The Future of the University

Our Mission

Our Values

SLIS Vision for 2007-2012: Connecting Ideas in Library and Information Studies

The Wisconsin Library School was founded as a summer school under the Wisconsin Free Library Commission in 1895. By 1906 it was a full-time professional program. Three years later it became affiliated with the University. Now the School of Library and Information Studies of the University of Wisconsin-Madison begins its second century of service to the State of Wisconsin and to the global library and information professions. Its vision is firmly rooted in its long-standing tradition of excellence in teaching, research, and service, and clearly fixed on the future of the University of which it is a part and of the information professions it serves. The School strives to anticipate and to respond to profound changes in the profession and the University through an examination both of what we do and how we do it. This document is one product of that ongoing examination; it represents our first steps into our next hundred years.

The Future of the Library and Information Professions

Technological changes have profoundly affected the library and information professions. Deskilling of some jobs previously regarded as professional, and the emergence of entirely new areas, have forced professionals to redefine or reclaim their jurisdictions, reexamine specialties, and develop new areas of practice. Library and other information professionals must merge their core knowledge and expertise in the selection, preservation, and organization of information and knowledge for access with new technologies that quantitatively and qualitatively alter how those core functions are performed. Practitioners now face such issues as how to support distance education, how to deliver materials electronically to scholars' desktops, how to collaborate in instruction, how to maximize and add value to information in research and development, as well as how to provide for the information needs of those without access to information technology.

There is evidence that public, school, academic, and special libraries will continue to be important places for research and development, scholarship, exploration, enrichment, and recreation. Libraries as places will continue to represent society's commitment to the preservation and transmission of the cultural record. The digital record, however, is not location bound, and professionals concerned with the organization and transfer of information--of which librarians are the root stock--will continue to discover new ways and new places to apply their expertise. Information professionals will enhance their traditional role while expanding both their technological expertise and the knowledge arenas to which it is applied. The need for people to filter, organize, and present information in comprehensible ways is great. The need for politically astute professionals committed to access to information for all is crucial. Markets we have not yet envisioned will be open for future SLIS graduates.

The Future of the University

The School of Library and Information Studies responded to the University's Vision for the Future: Priorities for UW-Madison in the Next Decade (1995) by providing leadership in collaborative efforts to explore such "interstices between mineshafts" as information and telecommunications policy, social informatics, print culture history, electronic publishing, and the system of scholarly communication, to name a few. We continue to respond to the University's directions as articulated in both that document and Targeting Tomorrow: The UW-Madison as the 21st Century Begins (2001), with the focuses that emerged from the 1999 reaccreditation project.

Closely connected to professional practice, the School is committed to the discovery and communication of new knowledge through research as well as to the education of new professionals for Wisconsin, the nation, and the world; our international students, Fulbright and other visiting scholars help us to globalize our deep commitment to the Wisconsin Idea. Our Continuing Education Services help our graduates and other information workers to improve their knowledge and skills. Our inextricable connection with information technology motivates us to try to model creative, appropriate uses of technology in teaching and learning. Our physical location and our manageable size contribute to the development of a learning community, a development enhanced by the transformation of our School's library into a teaching laboratory, and our emphasis on cultural and ethnic diversity encompasses and encourages civility, respect, and appreciation of others.

Our mission and values provide the context for the priorities the School has set to address the ways in which it aims to further the vision of the University and meet the needs of a rapidly changing profession.

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Our Mission

The School of Library and Information Studies of the University of Wisconsin-Madison exists to educate professionals to bring together information in all its cultural forms and the people who need or want it, thereby contributing to individual and collective knowledge, productivity, and well-being; to create and disseminate knowledge about recordable information, its users and uses, the services, processes, and technologies that facilitate its management and use, and the economies and policies that impact access to it; to provide for the continuation and enhancement of the faculties of schools of library and information studies through a doctoral program built on interdisciplinary research and teaching excellence; and to help shape the future of the library and information professions.

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Our Values

• We assert that information is a resource from which the public as a whole should benefit as well as an economic asset to which rights of ownership should under certain circumstances accrue. We assert that access to recorded information is of profound societal importance to children and adults, in all their diversity and throughout their lives. We are guided by the conviction that information professionals have a special obligation to provide, facilitate, and safeguard that access for all. We believe in the core values of service to our clients and the importance of intellectual freedom to a democratic society. We believe that information grows more valuable as it is used to create new knowledge and understandings. In that belief we focus especially on issues of policy and economics as they impact those who look to publicly-funded libraries and information services to meet their needs.
• We believe in the societal role of promoting production of and access to the greatest possible diversity of information. This role endeavors to ensure that the offerings of commercial publishers are supplemented and enhanced by organizational publications, government documents, and archival, out-of-print, alternative press, and other materials, so that all the voices of our society can be heard.
• Our mission is rooted in the rich traditions and continually transforming technologies of information service provided in libraries. We continue to embrace the personnel, facilities, processes, technologies, and organizational structures of information agencies, especially libraries, within our teaching, research, and service mission. Nevertheless we recognize that information seekers are no longer limited to sources within their physical reach, and we emphasize information practitioners as professionals rather than information agencies as places.

• Information professionals

  • Understand the characteristics of information, of information sources, and of the people who use these sources;
  • Understand the interactions between information seekers and information sources, and the operations of libraries, information centers, and related institutions that facilitate these interactions;
  • Recognize tensions between the public's right to know and the rights of individuals to privacy (including confidentiality of inquiry), of corporations to proprietary or copyrighted information, and of governments to security; between the mandate to keep the full record, and the need to preserve only that which meets reasonable standards of significance;
    
    
  • Believe that creating and maintaining information systems (including people, policies, processes, and products) that enhance the productivity and enjoyment of creators and users of information in all kinds of settings is a worthy role.

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SLIS Vision for 2007-2012:

Connecting Ideas in Library and Information Studies

The School of Library and Information Studies exists to provide premier education in librarianship, archives, and related fields of study. In our continuing efforts to achieve this excellence, the faculty and staff have agreed that by 2012, the School of Library and Information Studies will be globally known for its excellence in research and teaching, and valued by the University, the State of Wisconsin, and the community of information professionals for its innovative programming, outreach, and continuing education offerings. This goal aligns with the Wisconsin Idea and the University strategic plan of Connecting Ideas through promoting research, advancing learning, and nurturing human resources.

The School will enhance our leadership within our college, our university, and our profession through:

Promoting research:

• Conduct research that develops the boundaries and expands the perspectives of the LIS fields.
• Support faculty who can translate and negotiate between and across different academic departments and disciplines.

Advancing learning:

• Expand the skills and norms of the broad ideals of librarianship and archival studies -- information organization, preservation, and access; literacy learning; community engagement; and patron service -- as historical and contemporary social, political, and economic processes.
• Combine on-campus, distance, and continuing education strategies throughout our curriculum to accommodate learning flexibility on the part of our students and instructional innovation on the part of our faculty.
• Become the home for a new interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate program that applies the skills and norms of LIS to the UW-Madison undergraduate population in a way which brings benefits not only to students, but to the college, the university, and the department.

Nurturing human resources:

• Continue to attract highly qualified students from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds who will become leaders in the library and archives professions as well as in the larger information arena.
• Develop students who interpret the skills and norms of library, archival, and information practice that they learn within SLIS into both their civic communities and their professional communities, by encouraging, promoting, and supporting student association activities, student service-learning experiences, student volunteering activities, and student political activism efforts.

Accelerating internationalization:

• Recruit students and faculty who reflect the global population in their diversity.
• Encourage the presence of international visiting scholars.
• Enhance curriculum to increase visibility of international issues in the field.

Enhancing our resources and their strategic use

• Continue efforts to expand scholarships and research funding.