The University of Tennessee

The La SCALA program, a partnership between the University of Tennessee's College of Communication and Information and the University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science, will use its grant to recruit and educate four Hispanic/Latino doctoral students with the ultimate goal of placing them in faculty positions throughout the country. Hispanics are now the largest minority in the U.S., and while the number of Latino librarians remains low (6.7 percent of all librarians), the number of Latino library and information science educators is even lower. Latinos are especially poorly represented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) information, an area of growing importance to societal well-being.