|  It’s
probably not a good idea to talk to Ron Larsen about setting
limits.
Larsen, who succeeded Toni Carbo as dean of Pitt’s
School of Information Sciences (SIS) on July 1, 2002,
has seen his work reach the moon, literally—when
he worked for NASA as a programmer of real-time mission
support systems for the Apollo program. He also has plumbed
the depths of the oceans and explored the underwater cave
systems of Florida and Mexico as a certified cave diver,
logging several hundred dives to depths as great as 250
feet.
In other words, Larsen would seem to be just the right
kind of individual to build on SIS’ 100-year legacy
and the 17-year track record of Carbo, who stepped down
as dean to return to research and teaching as a professor
in SIS and Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and
International Affairs.
“SIS has a storied history and a record of innovative
accomplishment,” said Larsen. “It is a great
school. My objective is to continue this tradition and
extend SIS’ record of accomplishment into the arena
of global information infrastructure<
“Much of this work is known as ‘digital libraries,’
but it actually is more extensive than that, including
the organization of information for time-critical decision-making
and distributed collaboration around a common set of information.”
|
Pitt Associate
Dean Mary Kay Biagini welcomes new students during
the School of Information Sciences’ fall
orientation program. At right, Dean Ron Larsen.
|
The SIS history Larsen referred to began more than one
hundred years ago. In 1901, the Training School for Children’s
Librarians—the only school in the world at that
time devoted solely to children’s librarianship—was
started as a department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
Renamed the Carnegie Library School, it became part of
the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1930 and trained
most of the professional librarians in the area. Carnegie
Tech asked Pitt to take over the school, and, in 1962,
it became known as the Graduate School of Library and
Information Sciences.
Today, SIS has two departments—library and information
science, and information science and telecommunications—and
offers an undergraduate degree in information science,
three master’s degrees, four certificates of advanced
study, and two Ph.D. programs.
A longtime innovative leader with many programs ranked
among the nation’s best (Newsweek ranks SIS’
library and information science program among the top
five in the nation), SIS was the first school in the world
to introduce many new technologies into its curriculum,
as well as courses in information ethics and policy. In
1989, the school introduced the first information ethics
forum. Medical librarianship and biomedical informatics
programs were also groundbreaking efforts in the 1980s,
and SIS’ telecommunications program was the first
in any information sciences school. The school’s
wireless and geoinformatics curricula, begun in the 1990s,
keep Pitt on the leading edge of education in the information
sciences to this day.
|
Chris
Tomer (second from left), Associate Professor of the SIS’
Department of Library and Information Sciences,
visits with incoming students on the patio of the
Information Sciences Building during fall term orientation. |
But, while Larsen appreciates the uniqueness of SIS and
the challenges it presents, he hopes to build on the school’s
excellence.
“My objective is to help make a great school even
better,” he said. “SIS has world-class programs
in library and information sciences and is a pioneer in
telecommunications research and education. Its information
science program is highly regarded for its balance of
leading-edge research and a focus on addressing the challenges
facing contemporary society.
“Our Visual Information Systems Center, for example,
has provided significant advances for understanding geographically-based
information that has found use in analysis of global economic
forces and factors, and in understanding crime statistics.
The center’s work is now expanding to address emerging
issues in homeland security.”
Larsen said he accepted the SIS deanship because he could
appreciate the school’s potential. What he has found
so far has exceeded even his high expectations.
“The opportunities at Pitt are enormous,”
he said. “When I came here, I knew SIS was a great
school, but I didn’t realize the number of opportunities
from which we could choose to shape its future. For example,
we have had a program in medical informatics for many
years, but it has been relatively small. The advances
in information technologies applied in medicine and the
biological sciences present huge opportunities for SIS,
providing we make this a priority for the school’s
future. There are other areas of similar, but perhaps
less apparent, strategy.
“In the days of Andrew Carnegie, the school pioneered
children’s librarianship and the art of storytelling.
Today, we find the principles of storytelling recurring
in many of the open challenges of the emerging information
society, from managing medical treatment to understanding
terrorists’ motives. This information infrastructure
linking individuals with the information they need is
much more complex than simply a keyword search in a Web
search engine, and it remains a task that is both enabled
and facilitated by technology, education, and an understanding
of how humans interact with each other and with the abstractions
we call ‘information.’”
Larsen said SIS is engaged in a strategic planning process
to identify the available opportunities and to select
those that truly are essential to the school’s future.
“I do know, however, that many opportunities await
us,” he said. “I intend to focus on information-intensive
human enterprises, particularly where time is of the essence
and decisions are critical. If we can expand human performance
in these areas—examples include medical informatics
and crisis management—then these efforts spin off
to improve many other dimensions of human endeavor.”
Larsen understands that whatever success SIS enjoys will
be measured in a variety of ways.
“Some of these measures will be quantitative, some
qualitative, and some subjective,” he said. “The
imploding of the telecommunications industry and the dot-com
bust over the past couple of years have impacted our enrollment.
Meanwhile, the nation’s need for highly trained
professionals in information science has not diminished;
it has, rather, shifted in response to national threats
and changing opportunities. SIS needs, similarly, to adapt
its programs and curriculum to these changing priorities.
“Our success will be measured, first, by our ability
to restore our enrollment levels and, second, by our ability
to place our graduates in positions where they can contribute
significantly to society’s needs in information
organization, management, delivery, and utilization.”
On a qualitative level, Larsen said he is committed to
maintaining SIS’ nationally acknowledged level of
excellence.
“But our success can no longer be assured purely
by internal programs and the excellence of individual
faculty,” he said. “Collaboration with other
schools at Pitt and with other universities in larger
projects than we have pursued in the past is the key to
our future. I am going to foster an environment in SIS
that encourages and supports large-scale, collaborative,
multidisciplinary projects.”
As an example, Larsen pointed out SIS’ grant from
the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Buhl Foundation, recently
awarded to develop the Center for the Advancement of Libraries
for Learning, a regional partnership that aims to explore
and advance the role of libraries as dynamic partners
in lifelong education.
“And subjectively, we will measure success by how
well we have created for our faculty, staff, and students
an environment that fosters excellence, encourages open
scholarly discourse, and supports creative endeavors.
Success here may be hard to measure scientifically, but
it is easily perceived through the attitudes and enthusiasm
that each of us brings to our daily lives.”
In other words, for those who come to teach, research,
learn, or work at Pitt’s School of Information Sciences,
the possibilities remain limitless.
School of Information Sciences Facts
Dean Ronald
L. Larsen • Year appointed
2002 • Year school
founded 1962 (with origins back to 1901)
• Location of school
Information Sciences Building, 135 N. Bellefield Ave.
• Number of students
ca. 800 • Number of
full-time faculty 31 • Number
of degree programs 6 • Number
of certificate programs 4 • Number
of alumni ca. 8,000 • Departments
within the school 2 (Library and Information
Science and Information Science and Telecommunications)
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