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SILS awarded over $1 million from IMLS for research studies
July 18, 2005 – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 's School of Information and Library Science (SILS) has been awarded two federal grants with a combined total of over $1 million from the national Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
More than $21 million was awarded to 37 universities, libraries and other organizations across the nation to support education and research aimed at recruiting new librarians and helping to offset a national shortage of school library media specialists, library school faculty and librarians working in underserved communities, as well as a looming shortage of library directors and other senior librarians who are expected to retire in the next 20 years.
The first project, “Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science (WILIS),” is a three year joint project with the UNC Institute on Aging (IOA) that will study the career patterns of library and information science graduates. The $804,344 grant will allow SILS researchers Dr. Joanne Gard Marshall, alumni distinguished professor and principal investigator of the project; Dr. Deborah Barreau, assistant professor; Dr. Barbara Moran, professor; and Dr. Paul Solomon, associate dean; and IOA researchers Dr. Victor Marshall, director and co-principal investigator and Dr. Thomas R. Konrad, senior research scientist, to investigate the educational, career, workplace and retention issues faced by graduates. Dr. Jennifer Craft Morgan, a research scientist at IOA, will be the project coordinator.
“One of the goals of the WILIS project is to understand what has happened to graduates of our programs over the past 40 years,” said principal investigator Joanne Gard Marshall. “This is important because our graduates now have many different career options in the knowledge-based economy. Librarians as a professional group are also older on average than other professional groups, so there is reason to be concerned about the shortage being created through retirements.”
The initial stage of the research will be conducted in North Carolina, where a full range of information and library science program types exist. Minority career and retention issues will be a specific focus of the study. This phase of the research will contribute to statewide workforce planning for libraries and other information intensive organizations. The second phase of the research will use the methods developed in phase one to generate a transferable model for career tracking of ILS graduates nationally.
“We welcome this partnership with the School of Information and Library Science,” said co-principal investigator Victor Marshall. “The Institute has a strong interest in issues of an aging workforce, older workers and the changing retirement transition. This project enables us to broaden our scope greatly, while directly serving the people of North Carolina .”
SILS' second project, “Recruiting Medical Students into Health Sciences Librarianship,” was awarded $392,295. The project is a partnership with Duke University Medical Center Library and SILS, which focuses on recruiting medical students into a new dual degree master's program.
SILS researchers include Barbara Wildemuth, Francis Carroll McColl term professor, and Claudia Gollop, associate dean, in partnership with Patricia Thibodeau, associate dean for Library Services and Robert James, associate director, Public Services from Duke Medical Center Library.
“Today's medical information environment is increasingly complex, resulting in a critical need for 'medical informationists'— individuals who have both biomedical content expertise and an understanding of information and library science,” said Wildemuth. “The goal of this project is to test the feasibility of developing informationists by recruiting medical students to complete a master's degree in information or library science as part of their medical education,” she added.
Two medical students will be supported in completing the program for each of the two academic years beginning in 2006 and 2007. This perspective on the program and on a medical informationist career will be tracked over the two-year period.
“These projects are important research efforts for SILS and to those like us who are recruiting and training new librarians and information specialists,” said José -Marie Griffiths, dean of SILS. “We are grateful to IMLS for these research awards and to its foresight in recognizing the significance of recruiting talented professionals for the future.”
For more information about IMLS, visit:
http://www.imls.gov/
For more information about the Institute on Aging, visit: http://www.aging.unc.edu/
For more information about the Duke Medical Center Library, visit: http://www.mclibrary.duke.edu/