Library Faculty/Staff Scholarship and Research

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/11

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Author: search.filters.author.Bradley, BenjaminSubject: search.filters.subject.UISP

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    Belonging in the Urban Information Specialist Program
    (Journal of New Librarianship, 2024-02-05) Bradley, Benjamin
    The Urban Information Specialist Program lasted only one year, from 1970-1971, at the University of Maryland School of Library and Information Service (SLIS). While short lived, the program raised big questions that resonate still today about who could become a librarian and what role a librarian plays. The program sought to diversify librarianship by recruiting students with experience working and serving diverse communities and eliminating barriers such as the requirement of a Bachelor’s degree. The program’s end was met with protest and debate about racism within the university and in the SLIS. This article looks at contemporary student publications to better understand how library science programs can improve to promote diversity within a primarily white profession and in Primarily White Institutions (PWI).
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    Reevaluating the University of Maryland's Urban Information Specialist Program
    (2022-05-06) Bradley, Benjamin
    This presentation is an overview of archival research I have performed focusing on the student experience and response to the closure of the Urban Information Specialist Program (UISP) at the University of Maryland's School of Library and Information Service (SLIS). The UISP was developed by Mary Lee Bundy and lead by James Welbourne, and was designed to recruit lower income students, especially African Americans, to serve as librarians in lower-income communities. The UISP was an experimental program that remove barriers to access a Masters in Library Science, but the end of the program was controversial and resulted in at least one campus protest and Bundy & Welbourne published a book arguing that the university cut the program purely out of racist hatred. This presentation provides an overview of the program and discusses some of my findings in the Bibliophile (the SLIS's student newspaper) and the Diamondback.