SLIS Network — Fall 2009

Alumni Magazine cover

The center feature of the Fall 2009 issue of the SLIS alumni magazine celebrated the 45th anniversary of the SLIS Doctoral Program. The introduction was by SLIS faculty member Elin Jacob, Director of the SLIS Doctoral Program:

“The doctoral program at SLIS was originally established in 1964, when the Division of Library Science was still housed within the School of Education. The first two graduates of the doctoral program - Navanitaya Intrama and William Studer - defended their dissertations four years later in 1968. In the 41 years since then, SLIS has awarded 168 doctorates, and I expect as many as six students to defend their dissertations by the end of the 2010 spring semester.

The doctoral program at SLIS has evolved significantly since its inception in 1964. At that time, the program offered the Ph.D. in librarianship and the information sciences and required applicants both to have earned a master’s degree in library science from an ALA accredited school and to possess "acceptable library experience."

Today, we offer the Ph.D. in Information Science; we admit students from a wide variety of backgrounds beyond librarianship; and we accept outstanding applicants who have not yet completed a master’s degree. Our doctoral students have backgrounds in fields as diverse as computer science, instructional systems technology, music, mathematics, communications, and linguistics - in addition to library and information science - and this, for me, is a strong indication of how far we have broadened our appeal and our prestige in the academic world.

‘Diverse’ is perhaps the best single word to describe our doctoral students as a collective. There are currently 39 students from 14 different countries: Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Kuwait, Mauritius, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and, of course, the US. Their minor areas (a requirement of the University Graduate School) span the university, from computer science, applied statistics and computational linguistics to business, political science and information systems to cognitive science, educational psychology and the history and philosophy of science.

The research interests of doctoral students are even broader than their minor areas, ranging from more traditional topics such as library management, music IR, intellectual freedom, scientometrics and scholarly communication to social network analysis, human-computer interaction, information visualization, and digital preservation to metadata, ontologies, and pervasive computing.

The objective of the doctoral program is to prepare outstanding graduates who will continue the SLIS tradition of innovative research and effective teaching. To this end, we are proud to provide students with an appreciation for and practical experience of scholarly research; to prepare researchers who can identify and conceptualize significant research problems; to produce scholars who have the potential to contribute new knowledge to the field; and to groom our graduates for long-term careers as researchers, teachers and consultants in both academic and non-academic settings.”

SLIS alumni have recently been mailed the Fall 2009 issue of the alumni magazine (SLIS Network, Vol.47, No.2). If you did not receive a copy, you can update your alumni address by emailing us at (slisnews@indiana.edu).

The full issue is available on the SLIS website: SLIS Network (PDF)

Posted November 20, 2009