PhD students may begin their studies only in the Fall Term in order to ensure a coherent program of study.
The Doctor of Philosophy in Library and Information Science program prepares students for careers in research, education, and professional practice. The program will give students the opportunity to gain the skills in teaching or research appropriate for careers at major research universities, teaching institutions, and library systems. The candidate must give evidence of superior scholarship and mastery of a specialized field of knowledge and must demonstrate his/her ability to do significant and relevant research.
Doctoral study in this field is a challenging, life-changing experience. You will learn how to conduct independent research through projects that have the potential to change the way people interact with information and to fundamentally impact how society evolves. This program will go far beyond giving you a set of skills… it will teach you to think in a completely different way. Coursework and research programs address cutting edge issues such as evaluating information in terms of being saved for posterity; information literacy in both developed and underdeveloped countries, closing the digital divide; and how social media impacts behavior and services in the Information Age.
Requirements for the PhD degree, a 54-credit program, include a minimum of 36 course and seminar credits beyond the master’s degree and 18 dissertation credits.
The School of Computing and Information invites applications from students interested in the following areas:
- Archives and archival studies
- Data stewardship
- Digital curation
- Digital humanities
- Digital and information literacy
- Ethics of information, data, and technology
- Informatics and libraries
- Information and data interaction
- Information culture and society
- Intellectual property
- Learning paradigms in information environments
- Libraries and information services
- Open science, reproducibility & transparency
- Research data management
- Scholarly communications / digital scholarship
- Social computing and information culture
Statute of Limitations
All requirements for the PhD degree must be completed in not more than 6 calendar years from the time of first registration (or 8 calendar years for part-time students). Students may, in extenuating circumstances, submit a formal request for extension of their statute of limitations or for a leave of absence from the program. The request must be submitted to the advisor and then presented to the LIS Committee on Doctoral Studies for a decision.
Alumni of this program have found challenging and successful academic careers at institutions such as the University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, Simmons College, Texas Woman’s University, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Toronto, UPMC, Kuwait University, and more.