Abstract:

With the top 10 universities  for archives and preservation specialty in USA (according to 2017 US News & World Report) as research objects, this paper investigates the current status of archival graduate education in USA from three perspectives; namely, research directions and degree-granting authority, curriculum arrangement, faculty, and etc.. The study concludes that the top-ranked archival education and research programs in USA are all attached to iSchools, where they, taking advantage of information technologies, have best library and information science education resources and numerous opportunities to develop.. The top-ten archival graduate programs have various distinctive core curricula and personal and targeted elective course systems, pay much attention to the forefront issues and employment problems, and have various-discipline qualified faculty and emphasizes the combination of theory and practice. Based on analysis of the development trend of archival graduate education in USA, the authors put forward that domestic archival institutions should develop distinctive multi-path graduate curricula, explore normalizing teaching models with combination of theory and practice, and advocate for recruitment of diverse-background faculty, all of which can be important references to the development of archival higher education in China.

Keywords: iSchools, Graduate archival education, Curriculum arrangement, Faculty, USA