Library and Information Professions and Education Renewal

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Main research activities have been conducted by four special teams : (1)education group which identified current situation of LIS education programs, instructors, and students ; (2)public library group which identified skills and knowledge required by public librarians and ways of acquiring and maintaining them ; (3)academic library group which identified skills and knowledge required by academic librarians and ways of acquiring and maintaining them ; and (4)school library which developed an ideal images of school librarians or school media specialists and ways of attaining them.We held symposia every year to share our study plans and findings with stakeholders in the library field, and tried to get feedback from them. In addition, we held nine forums : we invited five recognized speakers from Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore to share with us trends and issues of LIS education in their countries.The major findings of this project were : (1)Japanese LIS education remains unchanged for 50 years, and the gap with overseas LIS education has ever been increasing ; (2)Curriculum and contents of LIS education are not well standardized nor integrated into higher education programs and very few people who obtain librarian's qualification get employed in library markets ; (3)New areas of education including IT skills and user behavior are sought for ; and (4)Many people seek to obtain LIS education for qualification of librarians even though employment opportunity for full-time librarians are quite limited, which has hindered LIS education renewal in Japan for a long time.These findings lead to make following proposals :(1)Establish a certificate examination for students to be able to self-evaluate what they learned through LIS education and to obtain better employment opportunities ; and(2)Introduce a new standard curriculum for information professional education.