The Future of I.S.

Meet Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of Information Studies at UCLA. During my trip to Los Angeles, I met with the IS faculty and visited some of the libraries there at UCLA. My conversation with this up and coming academic star was fascinating to say the least. Ramesh's interests includes exploring connections between diasporic/indigenous communities and new media and how information technologies shape, transform, and differentially impact nations, cultures, societies along educational, political, health-related, social, and infrastructural dimensions.

Among his more interesting projects is the Emerging Databases, Emerging Diversity (ED2): National Science Foundation-funded initiative to study methods by which digital collections can be shared via systems that maintain diverse tags, ontologies, and interfaces. In collaboration with Cambridge University's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and the Zuni community of New Mexico, the $300,000-funded project inquires how digital access to ancestral objects affects diverse communities. Ramesh's work involves extensive field work in places like Kyrgyzstan and India. (Exciting!)

The faculty at UCLA represents Library and Information Science's gradual shift towards the iSchool movement. Academics such as Ramesh Srinivasan represent the new face of LIS. This has important implications for librarians, who will ultimately be bred and nurtured by these new scholars nontraditional perspectives to LIS. Rather than basing their studies on users of libraries, newer scholars such as Srinivasan, whose background is as diverse as his research (his PhD is in Design), go beyond the traditional domain of LIS. Inevitably, librarianship will change because of this new approach. New ways of thinking and research will be injected into the profession -- perhaps this is where the source of innovation in libraries will come from as well. From the classroom.