Translating an International Education to a National Environment: Papers Presented at the International Doctoral Student Conference Sponsored by the Doctoral Guild at the University of Pittsburgh School of Library and Information Science, September 23–25, 1988.
Edited by Julie I. Tallman and Joseph B. Ojiambo.
Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990. 259 pp. ISBN 0–8108–2072–2. $29.50.
This book contains the papers delivered at a conference on foreign student problems in adapting USA library and information science (LIS) education for use in their home countries. Most of the speakers/authors were foreign doctoral students or recent alumni of USA graduate LIS schools. The book is summarized and its recommendations spelled out in the introduction and the final recommendation paper by Ojiambo and Tallman, pp. xiii–xxi, 197–99.
The conference papers discuss the important points which have appeared in the literature of this field in the past three decades. Of course, the problems of foreign LIS students are much the same as those of foreign students in other social science fields. We have here merely a specialized example of a student–initiated attempt to grapple with these problems. USA school curricula are adapted much better to the needs of American than to the needs of foreign students, but to some extent the student criticisms apply to American LIS education for Americans as well as to American LIS education for foreigners. Conference emphasis is given to student problems rather than to faculty, administrative or curricular problems, and to spelling out problems rather than solutions in detail.
The most important problem is that what the USA library school teaches in the classroom is not necessarily useful to the practitioner in a foreign LIS position. Other student problems include adaptation to USA graduate school life, inadequate English language background, graduate student orientation, personal finances, homesickness, and poor study skills as well as native countries which are poor, technically deprived and not print–oriented.
The Pittsburgh conference seems to make certain unannounced assumptions about its subject and about foreign LIS students and to err in putting all students into the same mold. For example, there is the assumption that the students’ own national/regional LIS schools are inadequate, that all of the students want to return home to work, and that they have gone to the USA primarily to gain technical knowledge, rather than to escape home country dictatorships, wars, poor living standards and poor weather, or even to work in the USA permanently.
A more flexible, perceptive, imaginative and individualized approach to student problems would have been more practical. Almost overlooked by the foreign students is the fact that they represent only a small minority of the LIS students enrolled in any American school and that most of these schools have in total such small enrollments that establishing a second curricular track exclusively for foreign students is not feasible.
Several well written student papers seem to this reviewer to stand out from the rest as presenting useful, well thought out, and well organised statements. They include Francis on transfer principles and problems; Ojiambo on management skill transfer to developing countries; Zhou on upgrading Chinese LIS education; Newa on a new international education order; Haddock on national information policy in six nations (though it hardly relates to LIS education); and, Zhang on LIS computer network development in China (though it hardly relates to LIS education). These papers also suffer less than most from the book’s curse of vagueness.
Among the faculty papers, only Jean Kindlin’s history of Pittsburgh LIS school international activities seems to be useful. E.J. Josey’s brief keynote paper contains several good ideas but also a rehash of several old ideas and some bowing and scraping which should have been edited out; the paper is a clumsy mishmash of the good and the obvious.
One of the solutions to the LIS education problem which no one seems to have taken seriously is for the fourth or fifth year student to stay at home and attend his/her national/regional school, if one is available, though this solutions can seldom be used at the doctoral level. Of course, national/regional schools will produce a better education in certain countries than in others. For most of these students, the point of going to the USA is to attend an LIS school thought to be superior to the national or regional schools available at home.
But this book suggests that not all USA schools are necessarily so superior. In the end, however, there is no clear indication in the book of whether these students think the USA schools, with all of the faults and problems created for foreign students, are, on balance, better for them than the national/regional schools, or poorer. The two sets of schools suffer from some of the same problems.
The papers show little evidence of innovative thinking and creativity (except for Newa) or of research (except for de Oliveira), or even of the need for either one of these activities to be used in the present dilemma. Not all of the papers focus on the subject at hand and certain of them confuse comparative with international LIS. The sophistication of the topic contrasts with the unsophisticated and unprofessional approach adopted in several of the papers. In places, also, the publication resembles a piece of University of Pittsburgh advertising since two overly flattering papers are included about the school.
Since this is a short, miscellaneous and disparate kind of book, touching on a considerable variety of international LIS education topics, it treats most of them superficially. It contains more than twenty papers from as many individuals and they average only nine pages in length (without footnotes). The book has some value as a kind of subject field scrapbook tied together by the brief proper name and subject indexes. In the chapter and book bibliographies, too little attention is given to older material and to material from other subject fields and certainly too little emphasis is put on foreign and too much on American material (!).
It seems reasonably clear that the educational problems addressed in this book remain in place today and that the Pittsburgh conference neither discovered all of them, defined them clearly, proposed viable solutions for them nor led to implementation of more than a few of the solutions proposed. Perhaps the work’s primary contributions are those assembling in one volume many of the ideas mentioned in the previous literature and of containing extensive subject bibliographies.
John F. Harvey is an international library consultant based in Nicosia, Cyprus, and New York. His Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago. He was Dean of the Drexel University Library School and of the library school at the University of Teheran. Dr. Harvey has published widely in his many fields of interest, which include international librarianship, library education, and Cyprus studies. His most recent book is Internationalizing Library and Information Science Education (with F.L. Carroll), 1987. He currently edits the Cyprus Review.
© 1990 John F. Harvey.