This survey addressed the experience of receiving tenure through the personal narratives of Directors of Library and Information Science Schools in the USA. Fifty-five respondents were asked to rank the emphasis of the variables operating in tenure based on their experience. Participants agreed that the granting of autonomy via tenure was an opportunity to exercise academic freedom. With tenure came the responsibility to contribute as a citizen of both the institutional and disciplinary communities of the profession. The most prominent factor in determining tenure and promotion decisions for LIS faculty is demonstration of research productivity through peer reviewed publications: articles, books and conference proceedings. Teaching and service are also important components of academic life. It was found that collaboration underpinned collegiality and created an environment conducive to research. In turn, the stability and collegiality of a tenured position made the institution work as a teaching and learning environment.

This discussion focuses on the institutional cultures in which library and information science education finds itself. It concentrates on the general idea of the library and its relation to LIS education. It proposes looking at the library in society as an era-specific phenomenon and discusses the library that people know. The article also looks at three principal aspects of modern library that are being challenged by present circumstances. It dwells on factors that LIS education must consider in order to accommodate the new impression of the library. It reveals the change of modern libraries in three different aspects: its view that its chief cultural legacy lies in the social organization it created, its adoption of heterogeneous normative target populations as a basis for its work, and its dependence on government funding.

A study of the subject interests of LIS students in Singapore was carried out via a questionnaire survey of students and graduates of the master of science (MSc) information studies program at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, as well as survey of applications to the program. Cluster analysis was performed on the questionnaire data. The respondents were clustered based on the elective subjects that they selected in the questionnaires. For both sets of data, two distinct clusters were found - a library-oriented cluster and an information technology (IT)/information management-oriented cluster. In each cluster, further sub-clusters were found that correspond to known specializations in the field. An analysis of the relationship between the clusters and the areas of specialization selected by respondents indicated some ways of improving the areas of specialization defined in the MSc program. The cluster analyses were found to yield useful results and provided a better understanding of the students' interests and how the interests were structured.

Library and information studies (LIS) education may be misreading the academic community's expectations. A program's viability may hinge on a counterintuitive premise, where the academic culture allows each discipline to create its own criteria for its own evaluation. LIS programs may have unwittingly assumed that adopting the scientific mode might gain them currency in the academic realm; yet there is little evidence that LIS programs had the prerequisite infrastructure to compete with a science discipline in terms of sustained funded research, teaching assistant and postdoctoral assistant services, laboratory equipment, and other resources. There is an irony that many LIS students and faculty do not come from the scientific disciplines, and this further inhibits their ability to compete in that arena. LIS program and faculty evaluators have used criteria from the sciences to measure LIS progress and to determine an individual's suitability for promotion. We contend that this application of inappropriate criteria has done unnecessary harm to LIS and the individuals in it. An examination of selected COA self-study responses and other sources indicates that LIS may misread the academic culture because LIS does not appear to be central to university governance. Finally, the waning of LIS's affiliation with libraries may do LIS irreparable harm. LIS's focus may need to be recentered on educating librarians.

Lois Upham is the Editor of this column: The Standards Connection and the Asociation for Library and Information Science Education representative to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). This column is based on the October 1995 issue of Information Standards Quarterly, which was received in January 1996; Upham reviews articles from this issue and summarizes the standards work of NISO for the past year. She also notes that the Association for Library and Information Science Education was withdrawing from subsequent NISO membership.

This article points out the importance of discussions about distance-learning quality, formats, and appropriate usage. It addresses some elementary issues, trying to bring up questions and to answer them. Particularly, this article talks how modern technologies play important roles in the design of distance education.

This essay argues for the importance of the study of production, distribution, and the cultural impact of texts for digital librarianship. An argument is made for integrating historical viewpoints in coursework that can prepare master's library and information science (MLIS) students for the curatorial aspects of digital librarianship. Several components of that approach are discussed in this essay. Their application in the classroom using a course on American bestsellers which involved collaborative teaching using the Internet as a case study, is presented as well. This paper reveals how book historians may find new roles as interpreters of the transformation of the library, from a logocentric library, which traditionally provides a fixed physical framework within which texts are accessible to users, to a soft library delivered on distributed servers - as a knowledge continuum. The emergence of new modes of textual transmission, the changing concept of the text, and the need to create new social spaces in which texts are collected and used can benefit from an awareness of the production, distribution, and use of text in traditional media environments.

This study ascertains the attitudes of library school alumni regarding the value of including various competencies in an M.L.S. program in order to facilitate curriculum planning. A total of 736 alumni rated a list of fifty-five competencies. Twenty-five percent of alumni had been out of library school less than three years; 60 percent had been out less than ten years. The largest category of respondents is represented by public librarians (39 percent), followed by academic librarians (20 percent), school librarians (19 percent), special librarians (10 percent), and those in nonlibrary settings (12 percent). There was a significant relationship between the type of library course taken during library school and the type of library in which the respondent found employment. Childrenâ s and young adult literature was the most poplar â type of literatureâ course taken. The five competencies ranked most frequently as essential include: knowledge of sources, collection management skills, conducting a reference interview, communicating effectively in writing, and the ability to apply critical thinking skills to library problems. Rating of competencies was also analyzed by beginning librarians. Competencies valued also differed as a function of setting. Findings were compared to those of an earlier study conducted by the authors in 1987.

Since the 1970s, most disciplines and schools of professional studies have developed their areas of curriculum, research, and theory construction by including race and ethnic studies. At the same time, library and information studies has lagged in providing a broader understanding of race and librarianship. Although attempts have been made to fill the racial-understanding gap, most of the work is characterized as exceptional/pioneer biography, with little attention given to broader social constructs of race and racism. This article explores how library and information science education falls short in contributing to the literature on race and racism. The current multicultural movement in library science is to be addressed.

This article summarizes the differences between teaching adults and teaching children. It evaluates the concept of andragogy â a term that describes the teaching of children â in order to conclude the major characteristics of adult learning. It also makes some suggestions for the development of curricula of graduate programs.