Recent Travel and Research Activities: Maria Haigh

In recent months, Maria Haigh, Assistant Professor at SOIS, researched and presented on issues pertaining to library and information science in Eastern Europe. At the VI World Computer Law Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, Professor Haigh talked about intellectual property issues in the Soviet Union and the now former Soviet Block. She focused on the issues’ cultural contexts. She argued that the culture of modern day peer-to-peer file sharing in the Ukraine bears resemblance to the Samizdat tradition developed in Soviet times. She was invited to submit a paper on this topic, “Downloading Communism: File-Sharing as Samizdat in Ukraine,” to the journal Script-ed, published by the School of Law of the University of Edinburgh.

Haigh also worked on an article on past and current trends in Ukrainian library education for The International Information and Library Review. Entitled “Escaping Lenin’s Library: Library and Information Science Education in Independent Ukraine,” it gives an overview over the historical development of library education and its current state based on a review of the Ukrainian literature, a survey of curricula, and interviews with senior figures in Ukrainian library education. A comparison to library education in the United States is also included.