Information School: ‘Transformed’ library school changes name to fit purpose

If the UW Board of Regents on Friday approves the switch, the School of Library and Information Science will get a new name to reflect its modern scope: The Information School.

Already one of the University’s fastest-growing units, it has students doing things your grandparents could not have imagined, such as designing new search engines and conducting field studies of information needs among the elderly and impoverished.

Seattle is ground zero of the Information Age and now the UW has a school to reflect that emphasis. Its ambition is no less than international prominence.

“This is a truly transformed school,” said Director Mike Eisenberg, who in just two years in Seattle has put together a team of faculty and staff who have launched doctoral and undergraduate degrees, overseen a 25 percent increase in enrollment and increased research funding tenfold - not to mention moving to the cyber-wired new Mary Gates Hall.

The school’s new name, Eisenberg said, will encompass a wide range of academic interests including all three of its main academic programs: information science, library science and informatics.

Students earning the new doctorate in information science will fill senior posts in industry, government and education as researchers, professors, systems designers and even chief information officers.

A new undergraduate degree in informatics, meanwhile, will prepare majors to work in the information technology field, analyze national and global information policy and invent new methods for classifying and retrieving information.

But the traditional core of the school - library and information science - will in no way be diminished by the name change, Eisenberg said. The master’s in library and information science program this year was expanded by 50 students and dramatically boosted its professional outreach activities. It also recently earned the American Library Association’s fullest re-accreditation.

“Our actions,” Eisenberg said, “speak loudly.”

Library and information science, of course, prepares many of its graduates for careers as librarians, and the UW offers the only accredited master’s program in a vast region encompassing eight states.

“This is the golden age for libraries,” Eisenberg said. “They’re doing everything they used to do, but they’re also providing 24/7 service on the Internet and becoming the quality front-end information source. They’re the antidote to information overload!”

Finding a name that captured the breadth of the school, Eisenberg said, came down to choosing either a “smorgasbord” listing of specialties, or the broader “Information School” moniker.

The UW is not alone in making the latter choice. Syracuse, for example, has created a School of Information Studies, and Michigan a School of Information.

At the UW, the impetus for basic change dates to 1996, when acting Provost David Thorud appointed a Futures Committee to identify a new vision for the school. The panel recognized an opportunity to build a program of national and international prominence, and officials moved rapidly to initiate new programs and recruit Eisenberg from highly ranked Syracuse.

“I listed all these things that I felt the University of Washington needed to do,” Eisenberg recalled, “and there was such enthusiasm that they kept saying, ‘Yes, we’ll do it!’ ”

High on the list of changes is more collaboration with other colleges, schools and departments, ranging from business to communication to computer science. But UW officials also realized that placement within the Graduate School was no longer appropriate for a school that was now offering programs from the bachelor’s through doctorate level.

Thus, if the full Board of Regents approves the proposal already recommended by its Academic and Student Affairs Committee, The Information School will become the UW’s 16th separately organized school and college.