The Iranians’ efforts to design and accredit the first long-term educational program for library and information professionals in agriculture

Cooperation of LIS experts in agriculture sector of Iran has not been a steady state movement during the past decades. There has been some excellent works like Mrs. Emad's Agriculture Bibliography and the period of times like the rise and fall of Jahad-e-Sazandegy Information Center. While the efforts were patchy and unorganized, a generation of educated LIS experts with experience in agriculture sector, while not consistent, came out. For the first time a group of three experts consisting of one of the authors started to propose a blueprint of a course in LIS in Agriculture in 2006. After more than 200 hours of the meetings and personal study the final document sent to the upper committee for accreditation. The majority of the members of the committee were agriculture experts and the main activity of it also was accrediting the agriculture courses. The unfamiliar course called LIS in Agriculture, has not any chance for success. One of the reasons for rejecting the course was its name: library. Now we have started another attempt to prepare a new proposal for a course called Agricultural Information management (AIM) in postgraduate level. The prospect of the course is clearer than before because of the lessons learnt from past experiences and a changing world. This paper seeks answer to the questions like: Is there any job or career called agricultural information manager in Iran? Is there any in the world? What is the nature and features of the career? Does it need any formal and /or long-term education? What are the other jobs related to agricultural information management? What are the abilities for the agricultural information manager? What is the suitable host for the course: is it LIS School or Agriculture school? I used library study in my investigation for answering the above questions and in the end I proposed a conceptual framework for designing other long and short-term courses like digital libraries in agriculture, bioinformatics, LIS in agriculture etc.