On the morning of June 27, Mr. Slava Sterzer and Ms. Katharina Gudat, delegates of iSchools, came to our School for an exchange.

People attended the event were as followings:

Chuanfu Chen, Senior Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Wuhan University,

Wei Lu, Dean of our School,

Jie Xu, Director of the Department of Publishing Science of our School,

Lu An, Deputy Director of the Department of Information Management Science of our School.

Lihong Zhou, Associate Dean of our School, presided over the event.

Wei Lu warmly welcomed the visits of Slava Sterzer and Katharina Gudat on behalf of the School, and highly affirmed the contribution of iSchools to the global information academic progress and cooperative development. He reviewed the exchanges, cooperation and long-term friendship between iSchools and our School, hoping to carry out more extensive and in-depth cooperation with iSchools, help subjects construction, enhance international influence and achieve mutual benefit and win-win results.

Slava Sterzer and Katharina Gudat gave a detailed introduction on the culture and mission, operation mode and business work of iSchools. iSchools is committed to promoting relevant research, teaching and cooperation among information schools around the world, and providing a cross-regional, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary communication platform for global scholars by holding iConference in succession. In addition, iSchools is exploring the establishment of mobile phone applications to make it easier for members to participate in seminars, workshops, exchanges in community and other activities.

In the free communication session, the teachers and students had a heated discussion on the publication of iConference articles, the ways to participate in international exchange programs via iSchools, and the social media publicity of iSchools. Slava Sterzer said that iSchools was currently planning to cooperate with journals in related fields to provide publishing channels for high-quality academic articles emerging in iConference. In addition, iSchools has set up a PhD Community to provide opportunities for doctoral students to communicate with their peers by holding a series of academic seminars. Katharina Gudat said that iSchools has established publicity channels on several social media at present, and she hoped to expand its publicity platform in China in the future further.

iSchools was introduced to China by Chuanfu Chen in 2006. Our School joined iSchools in 2009 formally, and we are iCaucus of iSchools and the first developing country member. In 2017, our School hosted iConference2017, the 12th annual meeting of iSchools, which was held in Asia for the first time.

Our School maintains long-term close cooperation with iSchools and participates in the organization and decision-making of related issues. Professor Lihong Zhou is a member of the Board of Directors of iSchools, Professor Dan Wu is a member of the Data Science Curriculum Committee of iSchools, and Di Wang, a post-doctor at our School, is the first Chairwoman of the Asia-Pacific Next Generation Committee of iSchools.