Cultural Heritage Informatics: Building an Interdisciplinary Master’s Concentration

Abstract

The rising demand for digital information resources and services in the LAM sector has sparked many innovations by educators in recent years, as we seek to prepare students for careers in an environment that has continued to witness rapid and hard-to-predict changes. Granting agencies such as IMLS have played an important role in driving innovation to meet the needs of new professionals, in part by funding curriculum development projects within LIS schools, but also by facilitating dialogues between educators and practitioners. This work traces a 10-year process whereby one LIS school has designed and tested new courses as well as a new Master’s concentration geared to the needs of LAM professionals who will be expected to work intensively with digital technologies, workflows, and collections. Through a succession of projects, some with grant funding, the school has been able to engage practitioners on an ongoing basis, enabling it to build a substantial and regularly updated body of case-study data on LAM practices, which has informed course development efforts and which has enabled the school to meet its key objectives of delivering authentic learning experiences for students and to maintain an up-to-date curriculum in an evolving area of study within the LAM disciplines. It is hoped that both the experience and the results to date will help justify continued support for innovations in LAM education.