I thought that the following was pertinent to our "Library Technologies and Library School" thread.
Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN
--- On Fri, 9/26/08, Bruce Fulton <bfulton_at_email.arizona.edu> wrote:
From: Bruce Fulton <bfulton_at_email.arizona.edu>
Subject: [lita-l] Library Students to Get 'Leading-Edge' Training Thanks to Federal Grant
To: lita-l_at_ala.org
Date: Friday, September 26, 2008, 11:48 AM
Press Release: For immediate release - Source at
http://uanews.org/node/21692
Please excuse cross-posting
---
Library Students to Get 'Leading-Edge' Training Thanks to Federal Grant
The grant awarded to the University of Arizona School of Information
Resources and Library Science also includes a component that will measure
the effectiveness of the approach.
By La Monica Everett-Haynes, University of Arizona Communications
September 25, 2008
A newly funded project is expected to advance the way educators train
students to become librarians and information professionals.
The University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library
Science has received a three-year grant from the Institute of Museum and
Library Services that will allow for a more hands-on approach to teaching
and learning digital library technologies.
The grant, totaling nearly $540,000 made the UA's school the only
institution in the state of Arizona to receive an award from the federal
agency's National Leadership Grants for Libraries. The grant becomes
effective Oct. 1.
"This is very leading-edge for the whole discipline. Eventually the
majority
of classes we teach at SIRLS will be affected by this," Peter Botticelli,
an
assistant professor of practice at the school.
"It's going to have a major impact on how we educate," Botticelli
added.
The project, "Improving Student Learning of Advanced Digital Technologies
in
an Online Laboratory: A Research Approach," is meant to bring to the
classroom the type of learning that students would have had to seek out in
an internship.
"This project as a whole is fairly unique - it's primarily because of
the
approach to authentic instruction and hands-on learning as a way of
introducing the discipline to students," said Bruce Fulton, the
school's
digital project librarian.
The project is an indication of the field's movement toward data management
and more complex research in a data-driven world.
"One of the things we have is a mandate in both our certificate and
master's
programs to teach students how to use digital content technology to build
digital libraries and to manage them. That's the new role of
libraries,"
said Jana Bradley, director of the school, also known as SIRLS.
The UA school's partners are the UA Libraries, UA University Information
and
Technology Services, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Missouri
Botanical Gardens.
Each of the partner institutions will provide SIRLS with information that
then will be recorded and catalogued, then developed into databases - with
SIRLS students responsible for these tasks. So, instead of simply having Web
sites that simulate the work they would be doing as professionals, the
students will have the actual software and other tools to perform more
complex work.
SIRLS will use VMWare Lab Manager software - which is quite popular in
industry - as the program's platform to build a virtual online laboratory.
"This grant gives us the infrastructure we need to really let us create
practical and realistic exercises for students," said Botticelli, also the
co-principal investigator on the grant.
"They will be mimicking the tasks they would see in a library
setting," he
said. "It gets beyond the theory and is merging theory and practice."
The students will gain more practical knowledge, Botticelli said.
Simultaneously, SIRLS will study the effectiveness of the technologies used
and how well students are learning in the applied format.
"One of the reasons why we're leading the field is because we're
the first
to put these pieces together," said Bradley, also the principal
investigator
on the grant. "We could have written a grant just to build the online
environment, but we wanted to also research the learning environment."
###
Bruce Fulton, MLS
Digital Projects Librarian
School of Information Resources and Library Science
University of Arizona
bfulton_at_email.arizona.edu
Received on Fri Sep 26 2008 - 11:00:55 EDT