Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2007

Dean José-Marie Griffiths presides over the top-ranked library science school in the country, and she hopes it will double in size over the next 10 years. “Many people are coming to understand that we’ve been expanding from a pure library school to educating people to work in a wide variety of environments,” she said. The school is looking beyond cramped Manning Hall to new quarters, probably on South Campus.

In July, funded by a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, SILS began creating the new curriculum, the first of its kind in the U.S., in partnership with the National Archives and Records Administration. “Preservation is different in the digital world,” said Professor Helen R. Tibbo, who leads the project. “We haven’t really looked at how to preserve this stuff we’ve spent so much money making. We need to assure that it will be accessible in the future.”

Graduate and postgraduate students will work with all kinds of digital “stuff” — such as research databases, e-mail messages, sound files and video images — and learn to manage, describe, preserve and make them accessible in formats that now exist and in others yet to be developed. Once trained, some digital curators will create and manage trusted repositories — digital libraries of scholarly research data and institutional records — while others will work with campus museums or departments that have large image collections. Still others, as many an information professional before them, will work outside higher education.

SILS, at 75, turning a page

The curriculum is one signal that SILS, long ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the top information and library science school in the nation, is in a whole new phase of its development. Impending expansion — including a new building — is another. From its beginnings 75 years ago with 37 students and five faculty members, the school has grown to 336 students and 24 faculty. Dean José-Marie Griffiths hopes those numbers will grow much further once the school moves into its new home, slated for construction on South Campus near the business school.

“I think we can have a larger role on campus and in the state,” Griffiths said. “Many people are coming to understand that we’ve been expanding from a pure library school to educating people to work in a wide variety of environments. We’re hoping to double in 10 years, but right now we don’t have space for more people. We’re bursting at the seams.” Griffiths envisions a building that “plays with ideas of place and space.”