Library and information science(s) or studies (LIS) is an interdisciplinary field of study that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and protection/regulation of information, whether in physical (e.g. art, legal proceedings, etc.) or digital forms.
In spite of various trends to merge the two fields, some consider the two original disciplines, library science and information science, to be separate. However, it is common today to use the terms synonymously or to drop the term "library" and to speak about information departments or I-schools. There have also been attempts to revive the concept of documentation and to speak of Library, information and documentation studies (or science).
Relations between library science, information science and LIS
Tefko Saracevic (1992, p. 13) argued that library science and information science are separate fields:
The common ground between library science and information science, which is a strong one, is in the sharing of their social role and in their general concern with the problems of effective utilization of graphic records. But there are also very significant differences in several critical respects, among them in: (1) selection of problems addressed and in the way they were defined; (2) theoretical questions asked and frameworks established;(3) the nature and degree of experimentation and empirical development and the resulting practical knowledge/competencies derived; (4) tools and approaches used; and (5) the nature and strength of interdisciplinary relations established and the dependence of the progress and evolution of interdisciplinary approaches. All of these differences warrant the conclusion that librarianship and information science are two different fields in a strong interdisciplinary relation, rather than one and the same field, or one being a special case of the other.
Another indication of the different uses of the two terms are the indexing in UMI's Dissertations Abstracts. In Dissertations Abstracts Online in November 2011 were 4888 dissertations indexed with the descriptor LIBRARY SCIENCE and 9053 with the descriptor INFORMATION SCIENCE. For the year 2009 the numbers were 104 LIBRARY SCIENCE and 514 INFORMATION SCIENCE. 891 dissertations were indexed with both terms (36 in 2009).
It should be considered that information science grew out of documentation science and therefore has a tradition for considering scientific and scholarly communication, bibliographic databases, subject knowledge and terminology etc. Library science, on the other hand has mostly concentrated on libraries and their internal processes and best practices. It is also relevant to consider that information science used to be done by scientists, while librarianship has been split between public libraries and scholarly research libraries. Library schools have mainly educated librarians for public libraries and not shown much interest in scientific communication and documentation. When information scientists from 1964 entered library schools, they brought with them competencies in relation to information retrieval in subject databases, including concepts such as recall and precision, boolean search techniques, query formulation and related issues. Subject bibliographic databases and citation indexes provided a major step forward in information dissemination - and also in the curriculum at library schools.
Julian Warner (2010) suggests that the information and computer science tradition in information retrieval may broadly be characterized as query transformation, with the query articulated verbally by the user in advance of searching and then transformed by a system into a set of records. From librarianship and indexing, on the other hand, has been an implicit stress on selection power enabling the user to make relevant selections.
Library science
Library science (often termed library studies, bibliothecography, and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and other areas to libraries; the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information resources; and the political economy of information. Martin Schrettinger, a Bavarian librarian, coined the discipline within his work (1808–1828) Versuch eines vollständigen Lehrbuchs der Bibliothek-Wissenschaft oder Anleitung zur vollkommenen Geschäftsführung eines Bibliothekars. Rather than classifying information based on nature-oriented elements, as was previously done in his Bavarian library, Schrettinger organized books in alphabetical order. The first American school for library science was founded by Melvil Dewey at Columbia University in 1887.
Historically, library science has also included archival science. This includes how information resources are organized to serve the needs of selected user groups, how people interact with classification systems and technology, how information is acquired, evaluated and applied by people in and outside libraries as well as cross-culturally, how people are trained and educated for careers in libraries, the ethics that guide library service and organization, the legal status of libraries and information resources, and the applied science of computer technology used in documentation and records management.
There is no generally agreed-upon distinction between the terms library science and librarianship. To a certain extent, they are interchangeable perhaps differing most significantly in connotation. The term library and information studies (alternatively library and information science), abbreviated as LIS, is most often used; most librarians consider it as only a terminological variation, intended to emphasize the scientific and technical foundations of the subject and its relationship with information science. LIS should not be confused with information theory, the mathematical study of the concept of information. Library philosophy has been contrasted with library science as the study of the aims and justifications of librarianship as opposed to the development and refinement of techniques.
Difficulties defining LIS
"The question, 'What is library and information science?' does not elicit responses of the same internal conceptual coherence as similar inquiries as to the nature of other fields, e.g., 'What is chemistry?', 'What is economics?', 'What is medicine?' Each of those fields, though broad in scope, has clear ties to basic concerns of their field. [...] Neither LIS theory nor practice is perceived to be monolithic nor unified by a common literature or set of professional skills. Occasionally, LIS scholars (many of whom do not self-identify as members of an interreading LIS community, or prefer names other than LIS), attempt, but are unable, to find core concepts in common. Some believe that computing and internetworking concepts and skills underlie virtually every important aspect of LIS, indeed see LIS as a sub-field of computer science! [Footnote III.1] Others claim that LIS is principally a social science accompanied by practical skills such as ethnography and interviewing. Historically, traditions of public service, bibliography, documentalism, and information science have viewed their mission, their philosophical toolsets, and their domain of research differently. Still others deny the existence of a greater metropolitan LIS, viewing LIS instead as a loosely organized collection of specialized interests often unified by nothing more than their shared (and fought-over) use of the descriptor information. Indeed, claims occasionally arise to the effect that the field even has no theory of its own." (Konrad, 2007, p. 652–653).
A multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or monodisciplinary field?
The Swedish researcher Emin Tengström (1993) described cross-disciplinary research as a process, not a state or structure. He differentiates three levels of ambition regarding cross-disciplinary research:
- The "Pluridisciplinary" or "multidisciplinarity" level
- The genuine cross-disciplinary level: "interdisciplinarity"
- The discipline-forming level "transdisciplinarity"
What is described here is a view of social fields as dynamic and changing. Library and information science is viewed as a field that started as a multidisciplinary field based on literature, psychology, sociology, management, computer science etc., which is developing towards an academic discipline in its own right. However, the following quote seems to indicate that LIS is actually developing in the opposite direction:
Chua & Yang (2008) studied papers published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in the period 1988–1997 and found, among other things: "Top authors have grown in diversity from those being affiliated predominantly with library/information-related departments to include those from information systems management, information technology, business, and the humanities. Amid heterogeneous clusters of collaboration among top authors, strongly connected crossdisciplinary coauthor pairs have become more prevalent. Correspondingly, the distribution of top keywords’ occurrences that leans heavily on core information science has shifted towards other subdisciplines such as information technology and sociobehavioral science."
A more recent study revealed that 31% of the papers published in 31 LIS journals from 2007 through 2012 were by authors in academic departments of library and information science (i.e., those offering degree programs accredited by the American Library Association or similar professional organizations in other countries). Faculty in departments of computer science (10%), management (10%), communication (3%), the other social sciences (9%), and the other natural sciences (7%) were also represented. Nearly one-quarter of the papers in the 31 journals were by practicing librarians, and 6% were by others in non-academic (e.g., corporate) positions.
As a field with its own body of interrelated concepts, techniques, journals, and professional associations, LIS is clearly a discipline. But by the nature of its subject matter and methods LIS is just as clearly an interdiscipline, drawing on many adjacent fields (see below).
A fragmented adhocracy
Richard Whitley (1984, 2000) classified scientific fields according to their intellectual and social organization and described management studies as a 'fragmented adhocracy', a field with a low level of coordination around a diffuse set of goals and a non-specialized terminology; but with strong connections to the practice in the business sector. Åström (2006) applied this conception to the description of LIS.
Scattering of the literature
Meho & Spurgin (2005) found that in a list of 2,625 items published between 1982 and 2002 by 68 faculty members of 18 schools of library and information science, only 10 databases provided significant coverage of the LIS literature. Results also show that restricting the data sources to one, two, or even three databases leads to inaccurate rankings and erroneous conclusions. Because no database provides comprehensive coverage of the LIS literature, researchers must rely on a wide range of disciplinary and multidisciplinary databases for ranking and other research purposes. Even when the nine most comprehensive databases in LIS was searched and combined, 27.0% (or 710 of 2,635) of the publications remain not found.
The study confirms earlier research that LIS literature is highly scattered and is not limited to standard LIS databases. What was not known or verified before, however, is that a significant amount of this literature is indexed in the interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary databases of Inside Conferences and INSPEC. Other interdisciplinary databases, such as America: History and Life, were also found to be very useful and complementary to traditional LIS databases, particularly in the areas of archives and library history. (Meho & Spurgin, 2005, p.1329).
The unique concern of library and information science
"Concern for people becoming informed is not unique to LIS, and thus is insufficient to differentiate LIS from other fields. LIS are a part of a larger enterprise." (Konrad, 2007, p. 655).
"The unique concern of LIS is recognized as: Statement of the core concern of LIS: Humans becoming informed (constructing meaning) via intermediation between inquirers and instrumented records. No other field has this as its concern. " (Konrad, 2007, p. 660)
"Note that the promiscuous term information does not appear in the above statement circumscribing the field's central concerns: The detrimental effects of the ambiguity this term provokes are discussed above (Part III). Furner [Furner 2004, 427] has shown that discourse in the field is improved where specific terms are utilized in place of the i-word for specific senses of that term." (Konrad, 2007, p. 661).
Michael Buckland wrote: "Educational programs in library, information and documentation are concerned with what people know, are not limited to technology, and require wide-ranging expertise. They differ fundamentally and importantly from computer science programs and from the information systems programs found in business schools."
Bawden and Robinson argue that while Information Science has overlaps with numerous other disciplines with interest in studying communication, it is unique in that it is concerned with all aspects of the communication chain. For example, Computer Science may be interested in the indexing and retrieval, sociology with user studies, and publishing (business) with dissemination, whereas information science is interested in the study of all of these individual areas and the interactions between them.
The organization of information and information resources is one of the fundamental aspects of LIS. and is an example of both LIS's uniqueness and its multidisciplinary origins. Some of the main tools used by LIS toward this end to provide access to the digital resources of modern times (particularly theory relating to indexing and classification) originated in 19th century to assist humanity's effort to make its intellectual output accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge. The origin for some of these tools were even earlier. For example, in the 17th century, during the 'golden age of libraries', publishers and sellers seeking to take advantage of the burgeoning book trade developed descriptive catalogs of their wares for distribution – a practice was adopted and further extrapolated by many libraries of the time to cover areas like philosophy, sciences, linguistics, medicine, etc. In this way, a business concern of publishers – keeping track of and advertising inventory – was developed into a system for organizing and preserving information by the library.
The development of Metadata is another area that exemplifies the aim of LIS to be something more than an mishmash of several disciplines – that uniqueness Bawden and Robinson describe. Pre-Internet classification systems and cataloging systems were mainly concerned with two objectives: 1. to provide rich bibliographic descriptions and relations between information objects and 2. to facilitate sharing of this bibliographic information across library boundaries. The development of the Internet and the information explosion that followed found many communities needing mechanisms for the description, authentication and management of their information. These communities developed taxonomies and controlled vocabularies to describe their knowledge as well as unique information architectures to communicate these classifications and libraries found themselves as liaison or translator between these metadata systems. Of course the concerns of cataloging in the Internet era have gone beyond simple bibliographic descriptions. The need for descriptive information about the ownership and copyright of a digital product – a publishing concern – and description for the different formats and accessibility features of a resource – a sociological concern – show the continued development and cross discipline necessity of resource description.
In the 21st century, the usage of open data, open source and open protocols like OAI-PMH has allowed thousands of libraries and institutions to collaborate on the production of global metadata services previously offered only by increasingly expensive commercial proprietary products. Examples include BASE and Unpaywall, which automates the search of an academic paper across thousands of repositories by libraries and research institutions.
Christopher M. Owusu-Ansah argued that, Many African universities have employed distance education to expand access to education and digital libraries can ensure seamless access to information for distance learners.
LIS theories
Julian Warner (2010, p. 4–5) suggests that
Two paradigms, the cognitive and the physical, have been distinguished in information retrieval research, but they share the assumption of the value of delivering relevant records (Ellis 1984, 19; Belkin and Vickery 1985, 114). For the purpose of discussion here, they can be considered a single heterogeneous paradigm, linked but not united by this common assumption. The value placed on query transformation is dissonant with common practice, where users may prefer to explore an area and may value fully informed exploration. Some dissenting research discussions have been more congruent with practice, advocating explorative capability—the ability to explore and make discriminations between representations of objects—as the fundamental design principle for information retrieval systems.
Among other approaches, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice should also be mentioned.
Theory and practice
Many practicing librarians do not contribute to LIS scholarship but focus on daily operations within their own libraries or library systems. Other practicing librarians, particularly in academic libraries, do perform original scholarly LIS research and contribute to the academic end of the field.
Whether or not individual professional librarians contribute to scholarly research and publication, many are involved with and contribute to the advancement of the profession and of library science through local, state, regional, national, and international library or information organizations.
Library science is very closely related to issues of knowledge organization; however, the latter is a broader term that covers how knowledge is represented and stored (computer science/linguistics), how it might be automatically processed (artificial intelligence), and how it is organized outside the library in global systems such as the internet. In addition, library science typically refers to a specific community engaged in managing holdings as they are found in university and government libraries, while knowledge organization, in general, refers to this and also to other communities (such as publishers) and other systems (such as the Internet). The library system is thus one socio-technical structure for knowledge organization.
The terms information organization and knowledge organization are often used synonymously. The fundamentals of their study (particularly theory relating to indexing and classification) and many of the main tools used by the disciplines in modern times to provide access to digital resources (abstracting, metadata, resource description, systematic and alphabetic subject description, and terminology) originated in the 19th century and were developed, in part, to assist in making humanity's intellectual output accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge.
Information has been published that analyses the relations between the philosophy of information (PI), library and information science (LIS), and social epistemology (SE).
Ethics
Practicing library professionals and members of the American Library Association recognize and abide by the ALA Code of Ethics. According to the American Library Association, "In a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and freedom of access to information. We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations." The ALA Code of Ethics was adopted in the winter of 1939, and updated on June 29, 2021.
Education and training
Academic courses in library science include collection management, information systems and technology, research methods, information literacy, cataloging and classification, preservation, reference, statistics and management. Library science is constantly evolving, incorporating new topics like database management, information architecture and information management, among others. With the mounting acceptance of Wikipedia as a valued and reliable reference source, many libraries, museums, and archives have introduced the role of Wikipedian in residence. As a result, some universities are including coursework relating to Wikipedia and Knowledge Management in their MLIS programs.
Most schools in the US only offer a master's degree in library science or an MLIS and do not offer an undergraduate degree in the subject. About fifty schools have this graduate program, and seven are still being ranked. Many have online programs, which makes attending more convenient if the college is not in a student's immediate vicinity. According to US News' online journal, the University of Illinois is at the top of the list of best MLIS programs provided by universities. Second is the University of North Carolina and third is the University of Washington.
Most professional library jobs require a professional post-baccalaureate degree in library science or one of its equivalent terms. In the United States and Canada the certification usually comes from a master's degree granted by an ALA-accredited institution, so even non-scholarly librarians have an original academic background. In the United Kingdom, however, there have been moves to broaden the entry requirements to professional library posts, such that qualifications in, or experience of, a number of other disciplines have become more acceptable. In Australia, a number of institutions offer degrees accepted by the ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association). Global standards of accreditation or certification in librarianship have yet to be developed.
In academic regalia in the United States, the color for library science is lemon.
The Master of Library Science (MLIS) is the master's degree that is required for most professional librarian positions in the United States and Canada. The MLIS is a relatively recent degree; an older and still common degree designation for librarians to acquire is the Master of Library Science (MLS), or Master of Science in Library Science (MSLS) degree. According to the American Library Association (ALA), "The master’s degree in library and information studies is frequently referred to as the MLS; however, ALA-accredited degrees have various names such as Master of Arts, Master of Librarianship, Master of Library and Information Studies, or Master of Science. The degree name is determined by the program. The [ALA] Committee for Accreditation evaluates programs based on their adherence to the Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies, not based on the name of the degree
Employment outlook and opportunities
According to U.S. News & World Report, library and information science ranked as one of the "Best Careers of 2008". The median annual salary for 2020 was reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as $60,820 in the United States. Additional salary breakdowns available by metropolitan area show that the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area has the highest average salary at $86,380. In September 2021, the BLS projected growth for the field "to grow 9 percent from 2020 to 2030", which is "about as fast as the average for all occupations". The 2010-2011 Occupational Outlook Handbook states, "Workers in this occupation tend to be older than workers in the rest of the economy. As a result, there may be more workers retiring from this occupation than other occupations. However, relatively large numbers of graduates from MLS programs may cause competition in some areas and for some jobs."
Types of librarianship
Public
The study of librarianship for public libraries covers issues such as cataloging; collection development for a diverse community; information literacy; readers' advisory; community standards; public services-focused librarianship; serving a diverse community of adults, children, and teens; intellectual freedom; censorship; and legal and budgeting issues. The public library as a commons or public sphere based on the work of Jürgen Habermas has become a central metaphor in the 21st century.
Most people are familiar with municipal public libraries, but there are, in fact, four different types of public libraries: association libraries, municipal public libraries, school district libraries, and special district public libraries. It is important to be able to distinguish among the four. Each receives its funding through different sources, each is established by a different set of voters, and not all are subject to municipal civil service governance.
School
The study of school librarianship covers library services for children in primary through secondary school. In some regions, the local government may have stricter standards for the education and certification of school librarians (who are often considered a special case of teacher), than for other librarians, and the educational program will include those local criteria. School librarianship may also include issues of intellectual freedom, pedagogy, information literacy, and how to build a cooperative curriculum with the teaching staff.
Academic
The study of academic librarianship covers library services for colleges and universities. Issues of special importance to the field may include copyright; technology, digital libraries, and digital repositories; academic freedom; open access to scholarly works; as well as specialized knowledge of subject areas important to the institution and the relevant reference works. Librarians often divide focus individually as liaisons on particular schools within a college or university.
Some academic librarians are considered faculty, and hold similar academic ranks to those of professors, while others are not. In either case, the minimal qualification is a Master of Arts in Library Studies or a Master of Arts in Library Science. Some academic libraries may only require a master's degree in a specific academic field or a related field, such as educational technology.
Archival
The study of archives includes the training of archivists, librarians specially trained to maintain and build archives of records intended for historical preservation. Special issues include physical preservation, conservation, and restoration of materials and mass deacidification; specialist catalogs; solo work; access; and appraisal. Many archivists are also trained historians specializing in the period covered by the archive.
The archival mission includes three major goals: To identify papers and records with enduring value, preserve the identified papers, and make the papers available to others.
There are significant differences between libraries and archives, including differences in collections, records creation, item acquisition, and preferred behavior in the institution. The major difference in collections is that library collections typically comprise published items (books, magazines, etc.), while archival collections are usually unpublished works (letters, diaries, etc.) In managing their collections, libraries will categorize items individually, but archival items never stand alone. An archival record gains meaning and importance from its relationship to the entire collection; therefore archival items are usually received by the archive in a group or batch. Library collections are created by many individuals, as each author and illustrator create their own publication; in contrast, an archive usually collects the records of one person, family, institution, or organization, so the archival items will have fewer sources of authors.
Another difference between a library and an archive is that library materials are created explicitly by authors or others who are working intentionally. They choose to write and publish a book, for example, and that occurs. Archival materials are not created intentionally. Instead, the items in an archive are what remains after a business, institution, or person conducts their normal business practices. The collection of letters, documents, receipts, ledger books, etc. was created with the intention to perform daily tasks, they were not created in order to populate a future archive.
As for item acquisition, libraries receive items individually, but archival items will usually become part of the archive's collection as a cohesive group.
Behavior in an archive differs from behavior in a library, as well. In most libraries, patrons are allowed and encouraged to browse the stacks, because the books are openly available to the public. Archival items almost never circulate, and someone interested in viewing documents must request them of the archivist and may only view them in a closed reading room. Those who wish to visit an archive will usually begin with an entrance interview. This is an opportunity for the archivist to register the researcher, confirm their identity, and determine their research needs. This is also the opportune time for the archivist to review reading room rules, which vary but typically include policies on privacy, photocopying, the use of finding aids, and restrictions on food, drinks, and other activities or items that could damage the archival materials.
Special
Special libraries are libraries established to meet the highly specialized requirements of professional or business groups. A library is special depending on whether it covers a specialized collection, a special subject, or a particular group of users, or even the type of parent organization. A library can be special if it only serves a particular group of users such as lawyers, doctors, nurses, etc. These libraries are called professional libraries and special librarians include almost any other form of librarianship, including those who serve in medical libraries (and hospitals or medical schools), corporations, news agencies, government organizations, or other special collections. The issues at these libraries are specific to their industries but may include solo work, corporate financing, specialized collection development, and extensive self-promotion to potential patrons. Special librarians have their own professional organization, the Special Libraries Association (SLA).
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is considered a special library. Its mission is to support, preserve, make accessible, and collaborate in the scholarly research and educational outreach activities of UCAR/NCAR.
Another is the Federal Bureau of Investigation Library. According to its website, "The FBI Library supports the FBI in its statutory mission to uphold the law through the investigation of violations of federal criminal law; to protect the United States from foreign intelligence and terrorist activities; and to provide leadership and law enforcement assistance to federal, state, local, and international agencies.
A further example would be the classified CIA Library. It is a resource to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, containing over 125,000 written materials, subscribes to around 1,700 periodicals, and had collections in three areas: Historical Intelligence, Circulating, and Reference. In February 1997, three librarians working at the institution spoke to Information Outlook, a publication of the SLA, revealing that the library had been created in 1947, the importance of the library in disseminating information to employees, even with a small staff, and how the library organizes its materials. In May 2021, an unnamed gay librarian, for the institution, was shown in a recruitment video for the agency.
Preservation
Preservation librarians most often work in academic libraries. Their focus is on the management of preservation activities that seek to maintain access to content within books, manuscripts, archival materials, and other library resources. Examples of activities managed by preservation librarians include binding, conservation, digital and analog reformatting, digital preservation, and environmental monitoring.
History
17th century
The earliest text on "library operations", Advice on Establishing a Library was published in 1627 by French librarian and scholar Gabriel Naudé. Naudé wrote prolifically, producing works on many subjects including politics, religion, history, and the supernatural. He put into practice all the ideas put forth in Advice when given the opportunity to build and maintain the library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin.
19th century
Martin Schrettinger wrote the second textbook (the first in Germany) on the subject from 1808 to 1829.
Thomas Jefferson, whose library at Monticello consisted of thousands of books, devised a classification system inspired by the Baconian method, which grouped books more or less by subject rather than alphabetically, as it was previously done.
The Jefferson collection provided the start of what became the Library of Congress.
The first American school of librarianship opened at Columbia University under the leadership of Melvil Dewey, noted for his 1876 decimal classification, on January 5, 1887, as the School of Library Economy. The term library economy was common in the U.S. until 1942, with the term, library science, predominant through much of the 20th century. Key events are described in "History of American Library Science: Its Origins and Early Development."
20th century
Later, the term was used in the title of S. R. Ranganathan's The Five Laws of Library Science, published in 1931, and in the title of Lee Pierce Butler's 1933 book, An Introduction to Library Science (University of Chicago Press).
S. R. Ranganathan conceived the five laws of library science and the development of the first major analytical-synthetic classification system, the colon classification.
In the United States, Lee Pierce Butler's new approach advocated research using quantitative methods and ideas in the social sciences with the aim of using librarianship to address society's information needs. He was one of the first faculty at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, which changed the structure and focus of education for librarianship in the twentieth century. This research agenda went against the more procedure-based approach of the "library economy," which was mostly confined to practical problems in the administration of libraries.
William Stetson Merrill's A Code for Classifiers, released in several editions from 1914 to 1939, is an example of a more pragmatic approach, where arguments stemming from in-depth knowledge about each field of study are employed to recommend a system of classification. While Ranganathan's approach was philosophical, it was also tied more to the day-to-day business of running a library. A reworking of Ranganathan's laws was published in 1995 which removes the constant references to books. Michael Gorman's Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century features the eight principles necessary by library professionals and incorporates knowledge and information in all their forms, allowing for digital information to be considered.
In the English-speaking world the term "library science" seems to have been used for the first time in India in the 1916 book Punjab Library Primer, written by Asa Don Dickinson and published by the University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. This university was the first in Asia to begin teaching "library science". The Punjab Library Primer was the first textbook on library science published in English anywhere in the world. The first textbook in the United States was the Manual of Library Economy by James Duff Brown, published in 1903. In 1923, C. C. Williamson, who was appointed by the Carnegie Corporation, published an assessment of library science education entitled "The Williamson Report," which designated that universities should provide library science training. This report had a significant impact on library science training and education. Library research and practical work, in the area of information science, have remained largely distinct both in training and in research interests.
From Library Science to LIS
By the late 1960s, mainly due to the meteoric rise of human computing power and the new academic disciplines formed therefrom, academic institutions began to add the term "information science" to their names. The first school to do this was at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964. More schools followed during the 1970s and 1980s, and by the 1990s almost all library schools in the USA had added information science to their names. Although there are exceptions, similar developments have taken place in other parts of the world. In Denmark, for example, the 'Royal School of Librarianship' changed its English name to The Royal School of Library and Information Science in 1997.
21st century
The digital age has transformed how information is accessed and retrieved. "The library is now a part of a complex and dynamic educational, recreational, and informational infrastructure." Mobile devices and applications with wireless networking, high-speed computers and networks, and the computing cloud have deeply impacted and developed information science and information services. The evolution of the library sciences maintains its mission of access equity and community space, as well as the new means for information retrieval called information literacy skills. All catalogs, databases, and a growing number of books are available on the Internet. In addition, the expanding free access to open-source journals and sources such as Wikipedia has fundamentally impacted how information is accessed. Information literacy is the ability to "determine the extent of information needed, access the needed information effectively and efficiently, evaluate information and its sources critically, incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base, use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose, and understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally."
Journals
(see also List of LIS Journals in India page, Category:Library science journals and Journal Citation Reports for listing according to Impact factor)
Some core journals in LIS are:
- Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) (1966–2011)
- El Profesional de la Información (es) (EPI) (1992–) (Formerly Information World en Español)
- Information Processing and Management
- Information Research: An International Electronic Journal (IR) (1995–)
- Italian Journal of Library and Information Studies (JLIS.it)
- Journal of Documentation (JDoc) (1945–)
- Journal of Information Science (JIS) (1979–)
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Formerly Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology) (JASIST) (1950–)
- Knowledge Organization (journal)
- Library Literature and Information Science Retrospective
- Library Trends (1952–)
- Scientometrics (journal) (1978–)
- The Library Quarterly (LQ) (1931–)
- Grandhalaya Sarvaswam (1915–)
Important bibliographical databases in LIS are, among others, Social Sciences Citation Index and Library and Information Science Abstracts
Conferences
This is a list of some of the major conferences in the field.
- Annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
- Conceptions of Library and Information Science
- i-Schools' iConferences
- The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA): World Library and Information Congress
- African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) Conference
Common subfields
| Information science |
|---|
| General aspects |
| Related fields and subfields |
An advertisement for a full Professor in information science at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, spring 2011, provides one view of which subdisciplines are well-established: "The research and teaching/supervision must be within some (and at least one) of these well-established information science areas
- a. Knowledge organization
- b. Library studies
- c. Information architecture
- d. Information behavior
- e. Interactive information retrieval
- f. Information systems
- g. Scholarly communication
- h. Digital literacy (cf information literacy)
- i. Bibliometrics or scientometrics
- j. Interaction design and user experience"
- k. Digital library
There are other ways to identify subfields within LIS, for example bibliometric mapping and comparative studies of curricula. Bibliometric maps of LIS have been produced by, among others, Vickery & Vickery (1987, frontispiece), White & McCain (1998), Åström (2002), 2006) and Hassan-Montero & Herrero-Solana (2007). An example of a curriculum study is Kajberg & Lørring, 2005. In this publication are the following data reported (p 234): "Degree of overlap of the ten curricular themes with subject areas in the current curricula of responding LIS schools
- Information seeking and Information retrieval 100%
- Library management and promotion 96%
- Knowledge management 86%
- Knowledge organization 82%
- Information literacy and learning 76%
- Library and society in a historical perspective (Library history) 66%
- The Information society: Barriers to the free access to information 64%
- Cultural heritage and digitisation of the cultural heritage (Digital preservation) 62%
- The library in the multi-cultural information society: International and intercultural communication 42%
- Mediation of culture in a special European context 26% "
There is often an overlap between these subfields of LIS and other fields of study. Most information retrieval research, for example, belongs to computer science. Knowledge management is considered a subfield of management or organizational studies.
