Educating information professionals in a multicultural information society

LIS departments in English speaking countries frequently neglect the study of foreign languages. Argues that this is short‐sighted. Information professionals will be increasingly required to analyse and organise information from different cultural backgrounds, and to disseminate their own materials to an international and hence culturally diverse user group. The first section demonstrates the extent to which the English language dominates international communication. The second section shows that this problem is largely ignored by English language publications regarding the future of the LIS profession. Section three makes six positive suggestions of how to integrate new modules into current LIS courses to overcome the Anglo‐American bias and thus to educate students to become true experts in the multicultural information.