Thursday, April 23, 2009

UNC School of Information & Library Science Ranked #1

U.S. News Media Group has released the 2010 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools. The rankings are available online at www.usnews.com/grad and are to be featured in the May U.S.News & World Report magazine (on newsstands April 28, 2009). The 2010 rankings are of graduate school programs for a variety of disciplines, however some disciplines are not ranked this year. Information and Library Science is one of those; rankings for ILS programs come out every two years.

UNC's School of Information and Library Science was ranked #1 in 2009. UNC SILS shares this distinction with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The rankings are here. Of particular interest to me, UNC SILS is ranked number one in digital librarianship.

4 comments:

Alan Cordle said...

Hey -- mine made the list too! Only, it's the list of unranked ones. I did take one class at SLIS, so maybe I'll be ok. Dr. Shaw still there?

Hill said...

Alan, you are far and away the moral vanguard of librarianship. I'm serious. Dr. Shaw is no longer around, though I have heard of Dr. Shaw from faculty. Which class?

Alan Cordle said...

Ha! Don't know about that.

I took Shaw's class in library evaluation. It was strange on many levels: much more theoretical than anything I had at NCCU, lots of math and formulas. But he was very bright and passionate about the subject.

What was really weird was the disconnect from attending UNC-CH in the morning and then an evening class at NCCU. Aside from the obvious racial make-up disparity, it was also an age thing, meaning that all of the students at UNC were younger than me (though not by too much, but still, few had experience working full-time in a library). Then I'd go to NCCU in the evening and everyone was older, for the most part, and they were all full-time in libraries.

Are you the old man there? ;)

Hill said...

Indeed, I do feel like an old man after chasing Denali around then hanging with the hipster librarians in training. The demographic is still the same, for good and bad. It's a striking epitome of social stratification (in a lot of areas) when one looks at the two programs (and don't get me started on the bifurcation between LS and IS). Increasingly, though, there is a lot of cross-pollination between the local LS programs. I always wonder about other schools/programs outside of NC too...the ones that seem "cutting edge" or more multi-disciplinary. Grass is always greener I suppose.