time, more than $15 million in the school and the
information movement in general.
Atkins organized activities to explore possible directions. Under a Kellogg-funded initiative called CRISTAL-ED (Coalition on Reinventing
Information Science, Technology, and Library
Education; www.si.umich.edu/cristaled), he gathered leading educators and thinkers from the
library field and the broader information world.
Participants explored the nature and possible
futures of library education. Atkins liked to point
out that the advice he got from these conferences
was to think and act radically.
At the same time, Atkins convened a group
of University of Michigan faculty with diverse
perspectives; many had participated with him in
past interdisciplinary projects. Several were SILS
faculty, but most were from other departments,
such as psychology, political science, economics, business administration, and computer science. In parallel with the CRISTAL-ED efforts,
this group considered for more than a year how
to institutionalize their mutual interests. A key
strategy, ultimately successful, that emerged was
to use Atkins’s role as dean of SILS to transform
the school into something much broader. These
efforts led to the establishment of the School of
Information in 1996, the name being selected
from a list of more than 100 possibilities in discussions led by George Furnas.
The initial set of professional programs reflected
the new mission. In keeping with the U.S. tradition
of the principal library science degree being at the
master’s level, a collection of master’s of science in
information (M.S.I.) specializations were created:
library and information science (LIS), archives and
record management (ARM), human computer interaction (HCI), information economics management
and policy (IEMP), and a tailored option. LIS, HCI,
and the customized program were initially the
most popular, although the other specializations
grew over time. Subsequently, the school expanded
to nine MSI specializations. Interestingly, when SI
went to the American Library Association (ALA) for
accreditation, ALA accredited the entire MSI program, not just the LIS portion.
A concomitant change was a huge increase in
sponsored research. It grew from a few hundred
thousand dollars per annum to more than $10 million within a decade, radically changing the culture of the school.
Alternative Paths to Schoolhood:
Berkeley, Indiana, and Penn State
Another high-profile university, the University of
California at Berkeley, found its small library science school beleaguered. In 1992 it suspended its
Ph.D. program and considered closing the school
altogether. An external committee recommended
shifting the focus to information. In 1994 Berkeley
recruited Hal Varian from Michigan, where he had
been active in the School of Information discussions, to be dean of the new School of Information
Management and Systems. ALA accreditation was
abandoned, a clear break from the past. In 2006
UCB adopted the name School of Information, joining Michigan and Texas.
Indiana and Pennsylvania State University
adopted pure startup models, both in 1999.
Indiana’s School of Informatics was independent
of its School of Library and Information Science;
Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and
Technology stood alongside its Department of
Computer Science. Penn State hosted the first
iSchool conference.
During the mid- to late-1990s, other schools
enlarged their missions in different ways. Some
changed their names, others retained older
names while broadening disciplinary coverage—
the University of Illinois is a strong example of
the latter.
Multiple Disciplines
What were these changes about? The core vision is
that information, technology, and people are considered to interact and to be of roughly equal significance. Launching this required a decidedly interdisciplinary approach, with experts in each area sharing insights into meaningful syntheses of the three
components. The information component was populated from the fields of library science, archives,
and information retrieval. Technology came mostly
from computer science, but could include a range
of information appliances, such as telephones,
handhelds, and embedded systems. People were
initially represented by psychologists, sociologists,
anthropologists, and management specialists. How
to meld this interdisciplinary mix became a central
energizing thrust at the early iSchools.
Of the 21 schools in the iSchool organization,
15 have library science in their genes, but other
developments were also significant. Some computer science schools have broader missions,
