Education for Information 29 (2012) 1–17 1 DOI 10.3233/EFI-2010-0908 IOS Press iSchools and non-iSchools in the USA: An examination of their master’s programs Heting Chu Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University, Brookville, NY, USA Tel.: +1 516 299 2177; Fax: +1 516 299 4168; E-mail: hchu@liu.edu Discussions have been carried out in recent years regarding the emergence of iSchools in the field of library and information science (LIS). One theme in the discussions centres on whether those iSchools, deriving from LIS programs, are indeed different from other non-iSchools of the field. To address this question, five iSchools and five non-iSchools that host the ALA-accredited master’s program are compared in terms of program requirements, core courses, concentrations/specializations, and other related parameters. Few distinctive differences are observed between the two groups except for more course offerings by the iSchools and higher number of concentrations/specializations among the non- iSchools. This study also examines issues concerning the iSchool movement (e.g., exclusiveness) based on the findings obtained. Although branding is a common practice, it is the collaboration and interaction among all the schools, with or without the “i” prefix, that would truly advance the information field in general and facilitate information education in particular. Keywords: Comparative research, education programs, iCaucus, library and information science, library schools 1. Introduction and background In the domain of library and information science (LIS) education, iSchools (stand- ing for information schools) officially emerged as a distinctive caucus around 2005 with members coming from not only existing LIS schools but also disciplines such as computer science and management information systems [1]. The geographic lo- cations of those iSchools also reach outside the USA. Table 1 illustrates the evolution of iSchools at several major time points. As demonstrated in Table 1, the iSchool movement can be traced back to 1988 when three LIS schools, with the initiation of Toni Carbo who was then the dean of the LIS School at Pittsburgh, formed the “Gang of Three”. The major incentive for creating such a group was to facilitate interaction among member schools [2]. Thanks to specific contributions from several deans (e.g., John King of Michigan, the late Raymond von Dran of Syracuse) and general efforts by many other individuals, the iSchool movement has been gaining momentum rapidly. By July 2011, the iSchool Caucus (or iCaucus) had 31 members listed at its website www.ischools.org while its membership reached 27 in 2009 when data for this study were collected (see Table 2). The iSchool movement is meanwhile increasingly becoming a topic of discussion and research in the field (e.g. [3,4]). 0167-8329/12/$27.50  2012 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved AUTHOR COPY