and its alleged alienation from the (public) library world, he even stated that, ‘‘as for me, I would claim that the greatest disaster that has met Finn- ish library education is just ‘the science of information seeking,’’’ where he directly refers to Ja¨rvelin’s and Vakkari’s manifesto of 1988 (Suominen, 2004; see also Suominen, 1986; Suominen, 2002). Suominen’s critique of
‘‘userism’’ in LIS has also been noted internationally (e.g. Hjørland, 2002;
Noruzi, 2004), although he has published only sparingly in more well known languages.
The conception of LIS proposed by Ja¨rvelin and Vakkari got its final symbolic crowning when the official Finnish name of the department and the discipline was changed to Information Studies in 1994 (the English name had already been changed 1991 because that could be done without the blessing of the university administration). Another symbolic step was the transfer of the Tampere Department in 2001 from the Faculty of Social Sciences into the newly established Faculty of Information Sciences.
of the use of information by Scandinavian scientists and engineers in the proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information that was held in Washington in 1958 (To¨rnudd, 1959). However, she was not able to pursue her research career because of her work as library director, but she continued to have influence on the plans to develop the education program for information specialists during the 1960s.
Some of the acting professors of LIS in Tampere – it took six years to fill the post permanently – also had acquired part of their education in the USA. For instance, Sinikka Koskiala (acting professor 1972–1973) earned her PhD at the University of Maryland in 1980 (Koskiala, 1980), and Ritva Sieva¨nen-Allen (acting professor 1972–1977) received an M.A. in LIS from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962. The first years of the department were nevertheless too chaotic with the immense flow of students and too few staff to support the development of a research program (seeTammekann, 1987).
The most important among these Fulbright veterans was, however, Marjatta Okko (1925–1995), the first permanent professor in LIS in Tampere. She valued international contacts, both as a receiving and giving partner, and urged younger researchers to publish in international journals (e.g.Okko, 1982, 1983). She herself took part in the work of the Section on Library Theory and Research of IFLA, where her successor, Pertti Vakkari, also was active. Vakkari presented one of his first international papers in a seminar on reading research organized under the auspices of the Section in Moscow in 1984 (Vakkari, 1987a).
The scholarly cooperation with Soviet Union and other socialist countries was officially endorsed and well funded during the 1970s and the 1980s. In that sense, it provided an option for Finnish researchers to step onto the international arena, but this cooperation never became as informal and extensive as did cooperation with the more open communities in the west.
Some researchers in information science took part in seminars organized jointly by Finnish and Soviet scholarly bodies, e.g. TuulaLaaksovirta (1984) participated in a Finnish-Soviet seminar on communications research. Her study was in no way Marxist as were many other Finnish contributions in sociology and communication science.
Among the young researchers in Tampere, Kalervo Ja¨rvelin gained some experience in international publishing from his studies in computer science (for example Kangassalo, Jaakkola, Ja¨rvelin, Lehtonen, & Niemi, 1982;
Ja¨rvelin, 1982), but his first modest contribution that can be classified as an international publication was clearly in the domain of LIS (Ja¨rvelin, 1981).
His next, and decisive, international contributions were done together with
Aatto J. Repo (Ja¨rvelin & Repo, 1982, 1984a, 1984b), one of the pioneers of information science research in Finland, who has not let himself be tied in a permanent position in the academic world (except the honorary title of ‘‘docent’’ at the Tampere Department). He is well known internationally for his studies in the value of information. Pertti Vakkari soon also began his international publishing career with his historia literaria studies (Vakkari, 1986a).
The Nordic dimension has always been an option in publishing for Finnish researchers. Publishing in Swedish opens the way to the Nordic LIS community. This choice has been even more natural for those Finns who have the Swedish language as their mother tongue, such as Mariam Ginman. She has published extensively in Swedish both in Finland and in other Nordic countries, but she has also produced an extensive list of publications in English as well (see http://www.abo.fi/fak/esf/bii/mginman/
publications.htm).
However, research in LIS has not been confined to LIS departments. There are a number of successful researchers who have no relationship with domestic LIS departments. Among them are, for example, the first Finnish IR researcher who has published in Information Processing and Manage- ment, Pirkko Pietila¨inen (Pietila¨inen, 1982, 1983) and the former chief librarian of the Helsinki University Library, Esko Ha¨kli, a well known scholar in book and library history (for example, Ha¨kli, 1983). Some researchers from Finland such as Leena Siitonen (Siitonen, 1984) have pursued their careers abroad.
Internationalization as practiced within the Finnish LIS community has not been unique in Scandinavia. For example, Danish LIS education and research has always had active international contacts. But even the Danes (with the exception of Peter Ingwersen and Irene Wormell) were not as visible in the 1980s and 1990s in rapidly growing areas of LIS like infor- mation retrieval and information seeking, which were just the areas where the Finns were earning their laurels.
Another aspect of the strategy of internationalization of research was to invite internationally recognized researchers to Tampere and Finland and to arrange summer schools and doctoral workshops where their talents could be made to benefit Finnish doctoral students. A number of such scholars have visited Finnish LIS departments, ranging from Marcia Bates and Nicholas Belkin, via Brenda Dervin to Paul Solomon, Diane Sonnenwald, and Tom Wilson, to name only a few. Part of the visits have been funded by the Fulbright program and part by the funds received from the Finnish Academy.
Research in Information Studies in Finland 165