Toward Mutual Accreditation and Credit Exchange among LIS Programs in the Asia-Pacific Region

Abstract

As a part of the Library and Information Professionals and Education Renewal (LIPER) 2 project, the successor of the LIPER project, we are identifying the current situations of accreditation, student exchange, and mobility of library and information professionals in several countries in the region in order to explore how to introduce a mutual accreditation and credit exchange system within the Asia-Pacific Region. Specifically, we are conducting a study of global trends in Library and Information Science (LIS) education, by interviewing and surveying students and graduates of LIS programs in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Through this study, we hope to find better ways of promoting accreditation and credit exchange within the Asia-Pacific Region. In this paper, we provide some context of our study, including the current status of Japanese LIS education systems, and our efforts to renew them by introducing the LIPER project. We also introduce our collaborative research project within the framework of the LIPER 2 project and present some preliminary findings.