The new school being formed from UNC-Chapel Hill’s library and data science schools now has a name: the School of Data and Information Sciences, the university announced Thursday.
The announcement comes about four months after Chancellor Lee Roberts and interim Provost Jim Dean announced that the School of Information and Library Sciences (SILS) and School of Data Science and Society (SDSS) would become the “founding leaders” of the new program, which is expected to launch by July 1.
Notably, the new name does not include a reference to libraries.
Many other leading information-science schools around the country have already cut library science from their names, but it marks a major shift for SILS, which was founded as the School of Library Science 95 years ago.
Stan Ahalt, who currently serves as dean of SDSS and will lead the merged school, said in an interview with The Assembly that the name was selected out of more than 150 suggestions considered by a working group of faculty and staff from SILS and SDSS. “My personal opinion is that we’ve chosen a name that rather precisely captures what we intend for the new school to represent,” he said.
Many faculty and students in the school were concerned that SILS’ focus on libraries would fall by the wayside in the merger, a library science master’s student previously told The Assembly. The word was mentioned just once in Roberts’ and Dean’s announcement last fall.
Ahalt said library science will be “one of the great flagpoles of the new school.” SILS interim Dean Diane Kelly, who also participated in the interview, added that the “values” libraries represent, such as ensuring broad access to information regardless of education or income levels, will remain key tenets.
“All of those values that people associate with libraries and archives, those things are still going to remain,” Kelly said. “They’re not going anywhere.”
Also omitted from the new school’s name are any references to artificial intelligence. Roberts and Dean singled out the “transformational impact” of generative AI as part of the impetus for the merger. An unnamed SILS faculty member wrote to The Daily Tar Heel that the result of the merger would be a “School of AI.”
While AI will be an “important part” of the new school, Kelly noted that it won’t be siloed there since research and scholarship on the technology is diffused across the university.
About five months out from the school’s launch, other details are also coming into focus. Ahalt and Kelly recently decided that the school will use a “divisional structure.” The rough idea is for the school to start with two sections that will mimic the focuses of the existing schools—that is, one focused on data science and one on information and library sciences—though Ahalt emphasized the plan is not finalized and could change.
“We’re going to do the very best we can to do everything we can do up until July 1,” Ahalt said. “And then what’s not done, we will continue to get done.”