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professions. The Boone Library School began as an independent entity,
not affiliated with any university, and for years, Wood and then Seng
fought to keep it that way; it has evolved into a robust and important part
of Wuhan University, but it will face new challenges in the future. At

Illinois, we have had similar struggles to retain independence, as have
most of the iSchools, at one time or another. This struggle has provided
me with a keen appreciation for the early history of Boone, and it gives

us all of us a common cause. There’s also a challenge from the
profession itself, as some in the library world resist inevitable changes in
their practices, a resistance that is often expressed as a desire to
prescribe a curriculum, or to make invidious distinctions between the

“real” world of practice and the “academic” world of research and
theory. As Cheryl Boettcher notes: “Recurring complaints from
librarians in the field about the ivory tower of library education [which]

point to the split between theory and practice inherent in the American
academic model”. This kind of challenge too often comes from
professional organizations and accrediting agencies, who see it as their

role to ensure that educational traditions are enforced, even as the
profession they represent is being revolutionized.
Finally, from our peers in other parts of the university we

experience an academic challenge to our independence and self-
determination. As we follow the trajectory of our long-standing
interests in new ways of manipulating and extracting information—
interests represented for example by the career of Wilf Lancaster—we

cross into territory claimed by newer disciplines like computer science,
and there are sometimes border struggles. Scarcity of resources will, of
necessity, intensify these struggles, and information science programs

are not always the larger or the wealthier combatant; on the other hand,
we are often underestimated by people who have a limited
understanding of what libraries and librarianship are all about.
One of the problems we face, as schools of information, is that

“what we are about” is all kinds of information, in all kinds of settings,
being used for all kinds of purposes, with all kinds of technology, by all
kinds of people. That’s a lot of territory to cover when you have ten, or

twenty, or thirty core faculty. In fact, none of us can really cover it,
especially at the level of faculty research, and so all of us choose to
specialize in some areas. Those choices make each of our schools

unique, and they mean we compete less, and can collaborate more. On
the other hand, we do still need to provide comprehensive education to