Syracuse School of Information Studies Associate Professor R. David Lankes has been selected by European Union’s (EU) Erasmus Mundus Program to serve as a Visiting Scholar in its International Master in Digital Library Learning (DILL) during a semester in Parma, Italy, next year.
The University of Parma will host Lankes while he conducts teaching, student tutoring, and research activities with 20 DILL students, who represent 15 non-EU countries. His lectures will cover issues relating to access to digital libraries, users and usage of digital libraries, and participatory concepts in digital libraries.
“The DILL Master course has passed a very rigorous selection,” said Anna MariaTammaro, coordinator of the Parma modules. “It is an academic course and it has been considered the best in Europe for digital library.”
Lankes, who was invited to apply to the prestigious program, will be one of six scholars to teach in the DILL modules at Parma.
DILL is offered in cooperation between Oslo University College (Norway), Tallinn University (Estonia), and Parma University (Italy). Students spend at least one semester at each institution, and will earn a jointly conferred 120-credit degree from the partner universities.
Erasmus Mundus is a higher education cooperation and mobility program aiming to enhance the quality of European higher education while promoting cross-cultural dialogue through cooperation with third world nations. In addition, it contributes to the development of human resources and the international cooperation capacity of higher education institutions in non-European Union countries by increasing mobility between the European Union and these countries.
Lankes is the director of the M.S. in Library and Information Science program, and he is the director of Information Institute of Syracuse. IIS houses several-high profile research efforts, including the Educator’s Reference Desk and projects related to the National Science Foundation’s National Science Digital Library. He holds a BFA in multimedia design, an M.S. in telecommunications and network management, and a Ph.D., all from Syracuse University. He has been also been appointed as a visiting fellow at the National Library of Canada and the Harvard School of Education. He was also the first fellow of the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy.