Buffalo DLIS Joins School of Ed

Three LIS programs see accreditation continued

By Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 4/1/2007

The Department of Library and Information Science (DLIS) at the University of Buffalo (UB) will be placed in the Graduate School of Education, following the dissolution of the School of Informatics. The announcement comes after months of fact-finding and professional soul-searching.

Satish K. Tripathi, UB’s provost and executive VP for academic affairs, the administrator who abruptly pulled the plug on the School of Informatics last spring, noted that the transition would be completed by the end of the spring 2007 semester and won’t affect students.

The other candidate for the new home of DLIS was the College of Arts and Sciences. Accreditation is the next question remaining on the school’s radar. In June 2006, the American Library Association’s Committee on Accreditation (COA) granted UB DLIS continuing accreditation and scheduled the next comprehensive review of the Master of Library Science program for spring 2009.

The COA has announced three accreditation actions taken at the recent 2007 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle. COA has continued the accreditation of the three graduate programs, scheduling the next program review for fall 2013. They are the Master of Library and Information Studies, offered by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies, University of British Columbia; the Master of Science in Information Science and Master of Science in Library Science, offered by the School of Library and Information Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Master of Library and Information Science, offered by the Information School, University of Washington, Seattle.