Below is a partial list of some of the School's and individual faculty member's involvement in international activities. (This is a work in progress; if activities have been omitted, please let Evelyn Daniel or Barbara Moran know)Following the list are some implications for school policy and some suggestions for future fund-raising initiatives.
Formal Student Exchange Agreements
SILS has created individual formal agreements with two schools: the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Faculty of Information Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
UNC-CH has formal university ties with approximately 75 international schools and universities (see the complete list at http://study-abroad.unc.edu). Through these ties, SILS has a formal University agreement with the Department of Information Studies, Sheffield University, United Kingdom.
Under these formal agreements, students pay tuition to their home school plus their own travel and living expenses. Credit earned is residence credit. To date, we have had students from Charles University and Copenhagen but have not sent students there. We hope to send student to both Charles and Copenhagen in the spring semester. We have sent an exchange student to Sheffield but have had none as yet from there.
It would be possible to develop similar agreements with other schools if we wished to do so. It would also be possible to have SILS students study in the LIS units of a number of universities that are part of the University’s exchange agreements (for instance, Lyon in France or Oulu in Finland).
Formal Faculty Exchange Agreements
Under a three year Title VI grant with the Slavic Department, $9000 per year has been made available to support visitors from Slavic countries. Galina Varganova from St. Petersburg and Richard Papik from the Czech Republic have each spent a semester with us. This year the grant will be shared by two Slavic scholars. We expect Martina Dologova from Bratislava in the late fall and Marina Vadimova from Moscow State University of the International Relations (MGIMO) in the spring. Martina Dologova will also be also partially supported by an Open Society grant.
Barbara Moran has already submitted the necessary material to the Slavic Department so SILS can continue to bring eastern Europeans to SILS for another three years, if the Slav Department’s Title VI grant is renewed. In addition, she is working with the International Center on a new Title VI grant that would include money for support of Paul Solomon's international class. The new grant may also request funding for a web based course exchange program among SILS, Sheffield (through Tom Wilson) and the Robert Gordon School in Glasgow (through Ian Johnson). Joanne wants to include something on Women's Health issues. The grant proposal is due the end of September. If other faculty have ideas to propose for this grant, please let Barbara know.
We have held talks with Monterrey Technical University, Mexico through the UNC-CH Business School but have no formal agreement with them. This school appears to be seeking broad distance education hegemony in business education for the southern hemisphere.
Paul Solomon spent the 1997-98 year at Tampere University, Finland on a Fulbright scholarship. He also lectured at a number of Scandinavian LIS schools where he was though including University of Boras, Sweden and Gothenberg University, Sweden. Diane Sonnenwald developed a joint course with Marie Iivonen of Oulu, Finland and taught it via the web in the spring of 1997 on collaboration across boundaries and reported the results at an international conference at Maastricht, the Netherlands. Barbara Moran was the ALISE Visiting Scholar at the State Academy of Culture, St. Petersburg in 1996 and a visiting scholar to Charles University in Prague in 1998.
SILS has a formal agreement with the World Library Partnership and participated in the training that sent a dozen librarians to Zimbabwe to work with the Rural Library Development Program in Harare for a month this summer.
Last spring, Gary Marchionini brought two faculty members: Umesh Batra and Govindasami Chamundeesdaram from India to spend a semester in the Interaction Design Lab. We had an earlier visitor from India, Inder Mulhan, who was supported by a Fulbright grant.
Sponsored Visits by International Visitors
Diane Sonnenwald received a grant from the University Center for International Studies to bring scholars including Mei-Mei Wu and Shan-Ju Chang from Taiwan, Mirja Iivonen from Finland, and Sirje Virkus from Estonia to SILS in June of 1998 to discuss ongoing collaborative research. Earlier, UCIS has provided funding to bring Hannah Albrechtsen from Copenhagen for a month.
Susan Lazinger from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem spent a sabbatical semester with us in the spring 1999. Other faculty spending a semester with us include Itsao Miura from Tokyo, Young Mee Chung from Korea, Deborah Eaton from St. Edmund’s College, Oxford, and Tom Wilson from Sheffield University.
International speakers include William Clenell and David Vasey from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Deborah Eaton also from Oxford University; Ian Wilson from the British Library, Timo Kaköla fro the Computer and Information Science Dept. at the Univ. of Turku, Finland; Meurig Bergnon, Computer Science Dept, Univ. of Warwick, Rolf Daessler from the University of Potsdam, and Stanley Kalus and Rudolph Vlasak from Charles University.
Other International Agreements and Links
Evelyn Daniel had a three year grant through IREX to bring students from the former Soviet Union Republic to study at SILS for one for two year periods.
The Oxford Program is now in its 8th year. SILS has co-sponsored 2 week study trips for students and practicing librarians to Oxford to study British librarianship.
Faculty who had led these groups include Ed Holley, Barbara Moran, Evelyn Daniel, Helen Tibbo, Melissa Cain.
Many faculty have attended international meetings: Gary M to Tokyo, Paul to Finland, Sweden, France and England; David Carr to Finland; Scott Adams to Bolivia; Barbara to Romania, China, Israel, and England; Evelyn through IFLA to Barcelona, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Beijing, Amsterdam and Bangkok; Brian to Canada for a storytelling conference; Barbara W to England; Claudia attended the Copenhagen meeting in 1997; Diane has visited the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland and Taiwan. Paul Jones has presented at several conferences in England and in South Africa and Taiwan. Joanne presented a paper in Estonia this summer. Jane has been invited to the Dublin Core-7 in Frankfurt this fall. Jerry will be going to Slovenia, and Barbara M. will be returning to Oxford.
In addition, we have had a growing number of international students from a number of countries throughout the world. At least three of our PhD students – Alice Nkoma-Wanzuma from Tanzania, Alenka Sauperl from Slovenia, and Sun Been Moon from Korea – have returned to their native countries as LIS educators.
Some LIS students have completed a field experience in an international setting, for example, at the American School in Paris, in Peru, and at the Bodleian.
Issues Surrounding Continued or Strengthened International Involvement
The purpose of past international cooperative agreements has been to bring a global perspective to teaching and research activities at SILS. Should we formalize a mission statement for this activity?
Under the current activities, resource support from the School is required -- for travel, to supplement Fulbright stipends, to provide space in the School for faculty exchange visitors, to provide support for students and faculty arriving from other countries, for identifying funding sources and writing proposals.
What should the School's policy be toward supporting these activities? What is our priority for international engagements? Can/should international activities be self-supporting?
Case Statement for Future Fund-Raising
We might seek support to cover travel and living expenses for SILS students seeking to spend a semester abroad. The students who have come to SILS from Charles Univ. have been able to get grants from the Open Society Foundation (Soros) to fund their travel expense but there is no easily identifiable source to help US students.
We might seek support to cover travel and living expenses for students from other schools seeking to spend a semester at SILS.
We might seek support for international travel for faculty invited to present papers or otherwise participate in international scholarly meetings.
We might seek support for international visitors to come for varying lengths of times to interact with faculty and students.
What other aspects of our international adventures do we need to support?
Revised 9/16/99