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preservation, retrieval, and representation. Students in this concentration
must take the same two foundational courses required of all our Masters
students, but beyond those, they have three other required courses, in
Foundations of Data Curation, Digital Preservation, and Systems

Analysis and Management. Thereafter, they may choose from a number
of electives, depending on their interests. Those electives include
information processing, digital libraries, document modeling, metadata,

ontology development, knowledge representation and information
organization, information storage and retrieval, electronic publishing,
document processing, museum informatics, archives, preservation,
biological informatics, information transfer and collaboration, and a

number of others. We are already seeing considerable interest in hiring
the graduates of this program, in national laboratories, in corporations
and government organizations, and in science libraries, because all of

these organizations already face a deluge of scientific data, and they
already realize they need people with specialized education and training
in order to meet their responsibilities to their users, their funders, and

their charters. Employers may not think of these people as librarians,
but that’s what they are, and we recognize, in our requirements for the
data curation specialization, that in order to do their jobs well, these

librarians need a thorough grounding in the principles of library science
and in the history of information organizations, as well as an education
that encompasses new technologies, new data formats, and new user
requirements and behaviors.

The iSchools deans, as a leadership group, are an important
resource in meeting the challenge of educating librarians and other
st
information professionals for the 21 century. Together, we have a
responsibility to promote the successful evolution of our discipline, our
schools, our students, and our faculty. We have important opportunities
before us, too, and some of these we can only seize if we work together.
It is true that we sometimes compete (for faculty or students or funding),

but more often we help one another to navigate difficult circumstances
within and outside our universities. For example, each of the iSchool
deans’ bi-monthly conference calls ends with an invitation to raise

urgent matters with which the other deans could assist. We are stronger
and more effective, in our own universities and as a group, because we
share information—which is, after all, what we teach others to do. We

discuss many different kinds of benchmarking and planning data, and
we share strategies for managing our Schools, securing resources, and