We in the Digital Library Services Department are excited by the announcement that Professor Padmini Srinivasan has received a nearly $1 Million grant to recruit students in the area of digital librarianship to the School of Library and Information Science here at The University of Iowa.

With DLS Department Head Paul Soderdahl included as Co-Principal Investigator of the grant, our department will be afforded the opportunity to partner with these students and mentor them in areas of digitization, metadata application, digital preservation and project planning.

Students will receive formal training in librarianship through SLIS with special emphasis in digital librarianship through guided experiences in local digital projects, which will strongly benefit both the cohort of students and our DLS department as well. Several projects have already been targeted because they require the kind of leadership and experience that these students can provide, such as newspaper digitization, structured textual data and institutional repository planning.

Two of the three librarians of the DLS department (me included) have just recently begun their careers in digital librarianship, so from our perspective we especially look forward to help prepare some of the 24 students selected to participate in this program for careers of their own.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian