I. Garskova
The Historical curriculum at Russian and CIS universities is dramatically changing under the impact of new information and communication technologies. Professional historians more and more often deal with large scale innovations at libraries, museums, archives, publishing and multimedia houses and other repositories of the national cultural resources. New professional disciplines emerge as a response to the challenges of information technology. Advanced skills in computing are extremely needed to enable students to get a good jobs in the information society.
Some CIS universities have already established historical computing as a specialism and included MA in historical computing in the general curriculum. Different models of MA programs in historical computing have recently been opened at the Belorussian State University (1995), Mordovian State University (1996), Stavropol State University (1998), Russian State University for Humanities (2003) and some other CIS universities. The significant event of the last year was trasformation of the MSU Laboratory of historical information science (the leader of historical computing Russia and former Soviet Union) to the MSU Department of historical information science. The new department supposed to discuss a possible standard for MA program (800 hours in 6 terms).
The main themes for discussion are:
the list of core and optional courses for the specialization;
topics for MA dissertation in the field of historical computing;
the relationship between mainstream history and historical computing;
the relationship between mathematics and information science, on the one hand, and historical computing, on the other hand;
the relationship between theoretical, methodological and technological parts of a standard;
the role of summer schools in the education of new teachers for historical computing;
the forming a teaching repository of electronic resources and electronic library of readers available on the web.
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