Conducting a Needs Assessment for a Joint EU-US Digital Library Curriculum
October 1, 2009, Corfu, Greece.
WORKSHOP CANCELLED

Workshop Info:

As a result of different disciplinary and cultural influences, digital library (DL) educational programs and practices in the United States and the European Union have developed along different paths. As a result, the focus of DL education on each side of the Atlantic is on different approaches to DL development and different applications and implementations of DLs in practice. In our increasingly global environment, the unique strengths of DL education in the US and the EU are highly complementary. Current influences on DL education in the US and the EU would benefit from explicit collaboration to produce integrated approaches that combine these complementary strengths. DLs are inherently global and require learners and educators take a broad view, and it therefore is critical for DL education to be open and accessible beyond institutional and even national traditions.

Recent developments in the US have positioned DLs as a critical component in the long-term realization of the promise of cyberinfrastructure, as tools to change how science and humanities research is organized, stored, disseminated, and curated. There has also been an increased emphasis on museum informatics in the US in recent years, and a recognition that libraries, archives, and museums, as cultural heritage institutions, all possess similar missions. Recent developments in the EU have positioned DLs as a critical component in the realization of the i2010 strategy to build the European Information Society. The European Curriculum Reflections on Library and Information Science Education report also emphasizes the importance to DL education of technical skills and practical activities for learning and testing that knowledge.

The potential of DLs as tools for large-scale social and scientific change unites many emerging specialties: digital humanities, digital cultural heritage, digital government, e-commerce, e-science, e-learning... the list goes on. This trend has motivated Library and Information Science programs on both sides of the Atlantic to create new courses, curricula, and programs in response to the demand for a digitally literate workforce. The absence of a coordinated effort to establish a DL curriculum, and a lack of standards for evaluating the quality and coverage of DL content, however, has hindered the assessment of learning outcomes in DL education. Now that recent projects to develop DL curricula are completed or are soon to come to a conclusion, this period of experiment and exploration is coming to a close. The time is ripe for collaborative development of curricula for DLs and its sub-specialties, learning assessment metrics, and formal degree programs to prepare future generations of digital information professionals for a global digital world.

The workshop will have two goals:

• To present work conducted thus far in developing a joint EU-US DL curriculum, and
• To engage the audience in assisting the organizers in conducting a needs assessment for this curriculum.

The first session in the workshop will be an introduction and overview of existing DL and DL-related curriculum development projects. These will include:

• The NSF-funded Digital Library Curriculum Project, a collaboration between the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Virginia Tech (curric.dlib.vt.edu);
• The collaboration between Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to develop a concentration on the digital library area with a strong focus on hands-on activities and projects in existing digital libraries projects in libraries;
• The Digital Library Learning Consortium (DILL), a joint two-year Master Degree offered by Oslo University College, Tallinn University, and Parma University; and
• Writing Heritage in a Digital Environment (WHIDE), a joint Master Degree offered the University of Zadar, the University of Osijek, and Parma University.

In the second session, workshop attendees will conduct a brief SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of DL education in their institutions and in countries, as a way of initiating conversation about building a collaborative curriculum. Participants in the November 2008 Chapel Hill workshop conducted a similar SWOT analysis, the results of which are available on the workshop wiki.

The SWOT analysis will be followed by an analysis of the DL job market in the EU and US. Job descriptions, and the institutions hiring for DL-related jobs varies across countires. This part of the session will ask workshop attendees to pool their knowledge of the conditions of their local job market, to build a more complete picture of the DL-related job market internationally.

The third workshop session will be a single roundtable discussion or multiple roundtable discussions among breakout groups, depending on the attendance at this session. Discussion(s) will be moderated by the authors. The roundtable discussion(s) will address the following questions:

• Digital libraries vary in types, scale, and functions. A DL curriculum must reflect our vision and values for DLs in the cyberinfrastructure-enabled, highly interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. How are DL topics currently taught in your institution’s curriculum? What DL topics are well-integrated into the curriculum? What topics are weakly represented? What rationale shaped these curricular decisions?
• How should a DL curriculum be constructed to meet the needs of the students and the structure of the broader curriculum at your institution?
• What trends are developing in digital librarianship, and in the information field generally, that you believe will affect the skills your graduates will need to have in 5 years? What methods and venues do you use personally and institutionally to keep up with these trends?

The final workshop session will engage workshop attendees in planning the ongoing needs assessment of international DL curriculum. This session will address the following questions:

• How to develop rigorous instruments to collect data on the current and desired future states of DL education and curricula in LIS programs, and the state of the of the DL-related job market, in the EU and US?
• How to ensure that participation in data collection for this needs assessment is sufficiently lightweight that the maximum number of LIS programs in the EU and US will be able to engage with it?
• How to present the findings of the needs assessment in in actionable ways, so that the maximum number of LIS programs in the EU and US will be able to use the findings to effect change in their curricula?

Workshop Organizers:

Jeffrey Pomerantz, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Tatjana Aparac Jelušić, Department of Library and Information Studies, University of Zadar, Croatia.
Vittore Casarosa, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy.
Eva Méndez, Departamento de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
Javed Mostafa, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA.
Jian Qin, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, USA.
Michael Seadle, Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany.
Anna Maria Tammaro, Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dello Spettacolo, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy.
Seth van Hooland, Département des Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
Terry Weech, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Related Webpages:

• EU-US Digital Library Curriculum Development project site