Reevaluating the University of Maryland's Urban Information Specialist Program

Abstract

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.