Education for Digital Libraries

This article looks at the state of education in digital libraries. It reports findings from an international survey of library and information science (LIS) and computer science faculty, and websites, regarding digital libraries courses and curriculum at their institutions. Results of the study show that, currently, few schools offer courses specifically in digital libraries. While many schools have not developed Digital Library (DL) courses, they are aware of the need to develop curriculum in this growing area of research and practice. In this paper, selected examples of current DL course offerings are also provided to illustrate the variety of current DL courses. The web-based Diglib Education Collaboratory being developed at Rutgers University is discussed as an example of collaborative efforts amongst faculty at disparate locations. From our experience teaching a digital libraries course, students currently enrolled in DL courses often have mixed, and only vague, notions of both the nature of DLs and the content of courses devoted to their study.