World Guide to Library, Archive and Information Science Education (3rd ed.)

Citation

Smith, K. (2008), "World Guide to Library, Archive and Information Science Education (3rd ed.)", Library Management, Vol. 29 No. 8/9, pp. 813-814. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120810917567

This title was a long time coming and I congratulate IFLA colleagues in the Section for Education and Training Section (SET) for their perseverance. I have been involved with IFLA for some years and while only a recent member of SET, have known that this has been a long project of theirs.

I am very pleased to see this World Guide. Why do we need such a directory when many of the schools listed in it can be found on the web? Some of us will be aware of the web directory of library schools managed by Professor Tom Wilson, but even that needs constant care and maintenance to keep it current. Interestingly, Professor Wilson sent an e‐mail out some 12 months ago seeking assistance to maintain the site and suggesting that those with entries should pay for them. Even his generosity in creating the site and maintaining it has a timeline.

This latest World Guide provides us with a snapshot in time and a wealth of information on the composition and structure of the many schools of librarianship, archives and information science in the world. The unfortunate part is that some did not or were not able to contribute to the listings. If their entries were in an earlier edition, they have been entered and noted thus. This could be confusing if some of these schools no longer exist.

There are three helpful indices at the back of the book: of place names, of names of schools; and of countries where no evidence of schools could be located. There is also a list explaining the currency codes used.

The listings are arranged by country in alphabetical order, although the internal arrangement under each country heading is not necessarily alphabetical. It would be more helpful if it was. There are 560 pages and the title has 1,033 entries. Librarianship in particular is ubiquitous in this global village we live in. A complete entry contains many categories of information and some library schools were better at providing the required information than others. There are two main categories: Information on the institution with 19 sub‐categories; and the second Information on programme(s) with 16 sub categories. The extent of information required was large. My own experience in completing the questionnaire was that some of the categories had unique meaning that I did not quite understand, and I suspect this could have been the case for colleagues who are not well versed in possibly the US or European approaches to education in our field. An example of this is under the category “financial aids”. While the situation for this in Australia is fairly standard, it is obviously more complicated in other countries

Seeking information on non‐standard measures is not helpful and one example is “study hours/credits required”. If universities even within Australia do this differently there is no useful way of establishing equivalencies. At the local level in Australian there is an expectation that courses are all about the same in length and unit study load. How we are expected to compute study load information on an international scale is a puzzle to me.

Putting these concerns aside, it is good to see this title finally arrive. It will be useful to educators and students in our fields for reference, to assist in study leave planning and travel arrangements and to appreciate the extent of education in librarianship, archives and information science in the world. Even though there are 77 countries listed where no evidence of a school could be found, I wonder how many other professions would achieve 1,033 entries, and this with some schools possibly not included?