"Although it may seem on the surface that we're losing something, we will in the long run gain a whole lot more." Violet Harada Acting Interim SLIS Dean

With a unanimous vote over the summer, the UH Board of Regents made one of the professional schools on campus disappear.

The School of Library and Information Studies, established in 1965, is no more. Instead, SLIS students return to campus this fall under the administrative umbrella of Information and Computer Sciences, a department within the College of Natural Sciences.

Despite the consolidation, however, people on both sides are smiling.

To ICS chair Stephen Itoga, the reorganization means more well-rounded students. Meanwhile, Violet Harada, acting interim dean of SLIS, sees a stronger, more modern academic program.

The Strategy

While a surprise to many, the reorganization had been in the works for over two years, Itoga said.

"Even prior to (former SLIS dean) Miles Jackson's retirement, they were already facing the question of what to do," he said. "They had lost several faculty members and had less-than-ideal resources."

As a result, a task force was formed in Fall 1995 which proposed dozens of scenarios and explored several alternatives in depth.

"For 18 months, we were in a twilight zone," Harada said. "Without a dean, we couldn't make long-term plans."

"We are a small program," she said. "We had to reexamine current trends and look at how we could make our students more competitive."

While merging the library school with the computer science department wasn't one of the initial proposals, Itoga said it soon became clear that elements of the two programs were compatible.

"Both worked with information technology -- we were looking at it as developers, while they were looking at it from the user's point of view.

"Ultimately, we had complementary goals," Itoga said. "We wanted our students to be more aware of users' concerns; they wanted to be more aware of the capabilities of the technology."

The task force also took cues from the University of California�Berkeley, which had made changes in a similar vein.

"They didn't merge two programs into one," Itoga said. "They took faculty from several departments and created a whole new school of information technology."

While the UC-Berkeley move made sense academically, Itoga said the committee realized it wasn't practical for UH to add another school to its already malnourished family.

"Because of our economic climate, we knew it wouldn't appeal to anyone if our new idea came with new costs," he said. "Any plan that would take extra money would be viewed negatively."

The reorganization, by contrast, is expected to save the university about $50,000 in administrative salaries alone.

The SLIS dean's position will be converted into Library and Information Science program chair, a faculty position within ICS. The dean's secretary, meanwhile, will become an educational specialist elsewhere in the College of Natural Sciences.

But a slimmer budget is only one of the advantages of the reorganization. The move makes ICS one of the largest departments within the college, if not the university. Altogether, the new ICS department will be home to about 300 undergraduate students, 100 graduate students and 30 faculty and staff.

"There is strength in numbers," Harada said.

"Yes, autonomy (as a separate school) had its advantages, but given the small size of our school and given the priorities of the university, the extent to which we could exercise that autonomy was limited.

"We saw the university was moving ahead with technology, and meanwhile consolidating programs," Harada said. "We wanted to reposition ourselves to better fulfill the needs of the university -- acting proactively, rather than have people do things to us."

"Although it may seem on the surface that we're losing something, we will in the long run gain a whole lot more," she said.

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