Information Professionals 2050: Educating the next generation of information professionals

Over the past decade in the United States an enormous amount of critical attention has been focused upon all aspects of higher education. Much of this attention has been spawned by utilitarian concerns about economic costs and subsequent career return on investment,2 and by innovations in technology that lead to globalization and alternative modes of teaching and learning. Scientific and technical advances have become increasingly dependent on interdisciplinary teams that leverage diversity of thinking and work practices to solve complex problems and develop new fields of study that aggregate or subsume traditional boundaries. The structure and traditions of higher education resist development of interdisciplinary instructional degrees and programs. Critics of education have been especially harsh in judging those schools designed to educate individuals to enter various types of professions. Professional education has always faced tension in balancing theory and practice and today’s utilitarian concerns tend to emphasize translating theory to practice and embracing technology to improve productivity. These professional schools have been reproached for providing education that is outdated and inappropriate to meet the needs of the modern age. Professional schools of all types are now reconsidering long accepted pedagogical approaches and searching for ways to modernize both what is taught and how it is taught. Many large scale assessments of professional education in specific professions have attempted to provide new alternative approaches. For instance, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has recently funded a series of studies examining the educational preparation for many professions, including medicine, nursing, engineering, law and the clergy [1,4,5,8,9]. The changes that are occurring within the environment in which professional schools operate necessitate a reexamination of the old patterns of education. These traditional models have become outdated in the modern world where the nature of higher education, libraries, and information resources are affected by globalization, new technologies, multiculturalism and both financial and environmental constraints. As part of this reexamination, it is time for the institutions which prepare information professionals to re-envision the education that will be needed for the next half-century. Information Professionals 2050