An analysis of American Library Association Accredited degree programs

Abstract

According to the directory information (2006) extracted from the American Library Association on Office for Accreditation, this article describes and analyzes the name of academic units and the ALA-accredited degree programs that offered by 49 institutions of higher education in the United States of America. Library and Information Science(s) is the most common name of academic units. Library and Information Studies comes next. The predominant degree names of the accredited programs is master of library and information science, followed by master of library science, master of library and information studies and master of science. The word of "library" is found both in the degree programs and name of academic units approximately equally, i.e., 73%. The word of "information" appears in the names of nearly all the academic units, i.e., 98% that is 41.4% greater than that in degree programs. New emerging names of academic unit, such as "information school", "school of information" or "school of informatics" appear in multiple contexts. Their future development is worth further observation.