Library and
information science (LIS) (sometimes given as
the plural library and
information sciences) is a merging of the two fields library science and information science. The phrase "library
and information science" is associated with school Library and Information Science ls of library and
information science (abbreviated to "LIS"), which generally
developed from professional training programs (not academic disciplines) to
university institutions during the second half of the 20th century. In the last
part of 1960s schools of
librarianship 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. The trend was more for the
adoption of information technology rather than the concept of a science.
A similar development
has taken place in large parts of the world. In Denmark, for example, the
'Royal School of Librarianship' in 1997 changed its English name to The Royal School
of Library and Information Science. Another indication of this name
shift is that Library Science
Abstracts in 1969 changed its
name to Library and Information Science Abstracts.
In spite of this merge are the two original disciplines (library science and information science) still by some considered
to be separate fields while the main tendency today is to use the terms as synonyms,
but with different connotations.
In some parts of the
world the development has been somewhat different. In France, for example,
information science and communication studies form one interdiscipline.
In Tromsø, Norwaydocumentation science is preferred as the name of the field.
In the beginning of
the 21st century one tendency has been to drop the term "library" and
to speak about information
departments or I-schools.
There has also been an attempt to revive the concept of documentation and speak of Library, information and
documentation studies
(or science).Another tendency, for example in Sweden, is to merge
the fields of Archival science, Library science and Museology to develop an integrated field:
Archival, Library and Museum studies.
Relations between library science,
information science and LIS
"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 on 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 .
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.
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! 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
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:
q
The ”Pluridisciplinary”
or ”multidisciplinarity” level
q
The genuine
cross-disciplinary level: ”interdisciplinarity”
q
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."
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 .
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% 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
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." .
"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. "
"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 . Furner 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."
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.".
LIS theories
"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. 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".
The domain analytic
approach suggests that the relevant criteria for making discriminations in
information retrieval are scientific and scholarly criteria. In some fields
(e.g. evidence based medicine) the relevant distinctions are very
explicit. In other cases they are implicit or unclear. At the basic level, the
relevance of bibliographical records are determined by epistemological criteria
of what constitutes knowledge.Among other approaches, Evidence Based Library and
Information Practice should
also be mentioned.
