Rutgers Drops “Library” from Name of School
The Rutgers University Board of Governors approved a resolution April 2 removing the words “library studies” from the name of the School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies. Effective July 1, its name will be the School of Communication and Information. The school’s faculty had voted 30–10 in favor of the name change at a February 4 faculty meeting.
“It’s a conversation that has been going on within the faculty for about 20 years,” Dean Jorge Reina Schement told American Libraries. “There’s a general understanding that a good part of our school has evolved and grown, and that part of the program was not getting out effectively,” he said, explaining that many people thought that it was solely a library school. He noted that the new name puts “a focus on the two fundamental subject areas that drive all of our studies.”
The school houses three academic departments: communication, journalism and media studies, and library and information science. Schement noted that Rutgers is the only member of the Association of American Universities with a library program connected to a journalism program; the two schools merged in 1982. “Both librarianship and journalism are facing challenges,” he told AL, and through their affiliation in the school, “each of them can draw on the strength of the other.”
If the faculty were largely on board with the name switch, others were not: The executive board of the New Jersey Library Association adopted a resolution February 17 asking for the decision to be reconsidered, and the New Brunswick (N.J.) Home News Tribune reported April 2 that some 20 people connected with the library studies program attended the board of governors meeting to voice their opposition, saying the change could be detrimental to the library component of the school and that there had been insufficient public discussion.
“There is a community identification with libraries and librarians and by removing this from the name of the institution, you’re breaking it,” said Rutgers alumnus Maurice Freedman, a library consultant and former American Library Association president. “Alumni that feel alienated and disconnected are not going to be opening their checkbooks as readily as they would with a name they know and accept.”
Dean Schement stressed to AL that “the library program is not only intact, but we have invested our assets in it” by the recent addition of a new faculty member and hopes of attracting another in the near future, and with plans to pull together resources to offer additional scholarships.
Posted on April 10, 2009.