Dear colleagues, My name is Liviu Drugus, George Bacovia University in Bacau, Romania, active member of CIRET and a promoter of TD in journals (I founded Economy Transdisciplinarity Cognition journal - www.ugb.ro/etc), to students and teaching staff in Romania and Europe. As an economist I am interested in essentializing and compacting all so called "social sciences" into a unique coherent and transdisciplinary approach to be taught to gymnasium and high schools. Specialization may appear at faculty level. I personally appreciate your work to promote nondisciplinary approaches, but I propose you to let disciplines as far as possible and to put the necessary accents to holistic/ global visions. If I'll try to make a pyramid of possible and necessary approaches I'll put at the base (as most important) transdisciplinarity, then interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and disciplinarity - as a necessary bad thing. In this respect, I feel the need to have a quite clear and operational definition of TD. Romania, Europe and, little by little "all over the world" has Basarab Nicolescu as a founder and promoter of TD trend in natural and humanistic domains (you see, I avoided using "disciplines"), and it offered a definition of TD as a methodological research approach that goes "across, beyond and among disciplines". Your definition from the "Report of the Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute" mention only the first stage, i.e. "across multiple disciplines". In my opinion, this narrows the TD approach at an multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary stage. I do agree Howard Rheingold observation that TD is more than multidisciplinary approach, but his vision is strictly an interdisciplinary one. I suggest you, dear colleagues, to consider the definition from the Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (Basarab Nicolescu, Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, State University of New York (SUNY) Press, New York, 2002 , translation in English by Karen-Claire Voss).where you may find a more coherent vision on TD. Thank you very much for taking time for reading an opinion and for creating me the hope you'll consider it for your future work. Just because your Report circulated on the list of transdisciplinarity@yahoogroups.com moderated by Basarab Nicolescu, I'll circulate your answer on my lists as well. Thank you for your openness and time for dialogue. Prof. Dr. Liviu Drugus liviusdrugus@yahoo.com

This is an inenrtstieg observation. At my university, there is no separate formal training in research skills beyond a two hour library orientation for first years. Theoretically such skills are supposed to be taught within each graduate course, but in practice, most profs just turn you loose. For some people (myself included), this works fine. I actually enjoy the process of figuring out the toolbox for a given project it's part of what I love about research. But at the same time, it does seem like we're reinventing the wheel a lot. Another issue for us has been a general skepticism towards electronic searches without analog backup, as it were. I do a lot of work with the ProQuest newspaper databases, which has saved me countless hours of microfilm reading and enabled me to turn up hundreds and hundreds of references that I never would have located the old fashioned way in a fraction of the time. But there's a definite learning curve data input for the word by word searches is seriously flawed and you have to be a little creative at times to turn up what you need. I happen to think the time spent figuring it out is more than worth it. But there are still a few people out there who don't feel the time spent learning the ropes of electronic database research is worth the time when you could do it the old fashioned way. Perhaps this is the problem of a separation between library and department.