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Hello Library School history folks - sharing a bit of library history from Pratt - As you can see from the ALA list that Nancy Poole points to - Pratt Institute's accreditation dates from the first year of ALA accreditation (1924/1925) and has been continuously accredited since. The library school was housed in the Pratt Free Library which served the Pratt community but was also open to the general public and was thus the first public library in Brooklyn and predates NYPL. Significantly, Pratt's library school was founded not long after Columbia's making it today the oldest in the US. It's first director, Mary Wright Plummer (http://www.unc.edu/~bflorenc/libraryladies/plummer.html was passionate about children's books and her student at Pratt, Anne Carroll Moore, became the first children's librarian at NYPL serving in that position for 35 years (1906-1941). http://kids.nypl.org/parents/ocs_centennial_acm.cfm Tula Giannini, PhD, MLS, MM Dean and Professor Pratt, School of Information & Library Science 144 West 14th Street 6th fl. New York, NY 10011 212-647-7682 <http://pratt.edu/~giannini> http://pratt.edu/~giannini From: Open Lib/Info Sci Education Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nancy Poole Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2012 10:13 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Fwd: History: MLS, MIS, MS, etc Hello all: I believe Richardson's piece indicates that most schools of library science had the MLS (replacing the BLS) by 1949 - prior to the ALA's 1951 standards. (Cite available in my previous note). I can't imagine that anyone was purposefully leaving out the iSchools. Courses on the history of education for librarianship are rare and certainly not required (at any school of which I am aware) to obtain the PhD or MLIS/MIS/MSIS/MLS degrees - so how many of us are aware of the history of the best-known schools (or their own) let alone that of other schools? Because they have had more press and were first in a number of undertakings, Chicago and Columbia simply stand out more than Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Washington, Illinois, and the others - apologies to the iSchools I am leaving out here - but you are mentioned in the listings below. Yes, current members of the iSchools Organization do have long individual histories as schools of information or library science - whether they currently have ALA-accredited programs or not. iSchools as such have a much shorter history - 2000/1 for the development of the name and philosophy and 2005 (the first iConference) for the official announcement, unless you want to go back to the PIttsburgh-Drexel-Syracuse Gang of Three meetings in the 80s. All of this information can be found on the iSchools Organization website listed below. The University of Wisconsin at Madison and Simmons University, not iSchools, also have accreditation histories extending from the 1920s. Some schools were accredited in the early days, then dropped out, then re-emerged. My own university (UNC, Greensboro) is one of those - our program was accredited in 1929/30, when we were the North Carolina College for Women and that is prior to our sister school - UNC-CH's SLIS by a couple of years - who's counting ;=) - We dropped out in 1934 and re-upped 50 years later. The program at St Catherine University was first accredited in the 20s, dropped accreditation in 1959, and re-upped in 2009/10 according to the ALA website. Note I am referring only to accreditation here. Many schools of library science appeared much earlier than the 1925 date that is the base year for the ALA accreditation information to which I am referring. I'll let all of you old line folks provide the pre-accreditation dates. From ALA's website, here is the historical listing of all ALA-accredited programs - http://www.ala.org/accreditedprograms/directory/historicallist And here is the history of the origins of the iSchools Organization - http://www.ischools.org/site/history/ <http://www.ischools.org/site/history/> - which provides a listing of all current iSchools. Enjoy your weekend. -- Nancy Poole University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC Status, while important in its own right, is reinforced through its relationship to procedural justice because being treated fairly is, itself, a recognition of status. Robert Birnbaum (2004)