Celebrating 100 years of UCL’s Department of Information Studies By Professor Elizabeth Shepherd
T
he first British School of Librarianship began at University College London (UCL) in 1919, and our first students graduated in 1920. Over this centenary year, we worked on a community project to develop an online exhibition entitled ‘Geographies of Information: Celebrating 100 years of UCL Department of Information Studies’, which explores the history of the department and the role that teaching and research has played in the creation of an international professional workforce over the past decades. As well as the virtual exhibition tour, there is a timeline with key events and items from the archives and a series of podcasts from former staff and students (you can take the tour at <https://uclinformationstudies100.org/>). We also published the Centenary Publishers’ Prize volume on the theme of libraries. In November 1917, the President of the Library Association (LA), Sir John MacAlister, wrote to the Provost of UCL “to enquire whether it would be possible to institute at University College a School of Librarianship … to be established in co-operation with the Library Association”. The Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) commented at the time that “the number of new recruits to librarianship … was so small as to preclude any hope of making an institution of the kind successful”: I am pleased to say that over the past century we have proved that prediction to be wrong! The School for Librarianship at UCL was established with funding from the Carnegie Trust and in collaboration with the LA. Dr Ernest Baker, Secretary to the Education Committee of the LA, was appointed as the first Director, and Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum, delivered the opening address in October 1919. We had a very large intake in the first year of 88 students: many students were, and still are, female, a distinctive characteristic of librarianship and cognate disciplines which continues to the present day.
During the second world war, the School 48 BULLETIN 222 · JULY 2021
of Librarianship was suspended, but it reopened in 1945. The new director, Raymond Irwin, reported that “the demand for places was stimulated by the flow of students from the Services and the provision of grants … many libraries have been replenishing or expanding their staffs, and successful students have found little difficulty in obtaining suitable posts after training”. Sir Hilary Jenkinson, Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office, took the opportunity to petition the Provost of UCL to establish “a School of and Diploma of Archive Science”. It took 2 years to get the proposal through the college and university bureaucracies, but, in October 1947, the University Diploma in Archive Administration began. Jenkinson gave the inaugural lecture on ‘The English archivist: A new profession’. The School was re-named the ‘School of Librarianship and Archives’. Over the next few decades, we added more disciplines to our teaching and to our title: in 1972, we began an MSc in Information Science and added ‘Information Studies’, becoming SLAIS. Digital Humanities emerged under Professor Susan Hockey, who joined us in 2000 as Director. She established the new master’s in digital humanities. Susan is among former staff who agreed to be interviewed about her work, as part of our Centenary, so you
