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 schools of library and information science (abbreviated to "SLIS"), which generally developed from professional training programs (not academic disciplines) to university institutions during the second half of the twentieth 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 Tromsö, Norway documentation 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.
Tefko Saracevic (1992, p. 13) argued that library science and information science are separate fields:
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 (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.
"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).
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:
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 (see below).
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.
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.
"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.".
Julian Warner (2010, p. 4-5) suggests that
The domain analytic approach (e.g., Hjørland 2010) 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.
(see also Category:Library science journals and Journal Citation Reports for listing according to Impact factor)
Some core journals in LIS are:
Important bibliographical databases in LIS are, among others, Social Sciences Citation Index and Library and Information Science Abstracts
This is a list of some of the major conferences in the field.
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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
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 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
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 studies.
Hjørland, B. (2000). Library and Information Science: Practice, theory, and philosophical basis. Information Processing and Management, 36(3), 501-531.
Järvelin, K. & Vakkari, P. (1993). The Evolution of Library and Information Science 1965-1985: A Content Analysis of Journal Articles. Information Processing & Management, 29(1), 129-144.
Kajberg, L. (1992). Library and Information Science Research in Denmark 1965-1989: A Content Analysis of R&D Publications. IN: Teknologi och kompetens. Proceedings. 8:de Nordiska konferencen för Information och Dokumentation 19-21/5 1992 i Helsingborg. Stockholm: Tekniska Litteratursällskapet, 233-237.
McNicol, S. (2003). LIS: The Interdisciplinary Research Landscape. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 35(1), 23-30.
McClure, C. R. & Hernon, P. (eds.). (1991). Library and Information Science Research: Perspectives and Strategies for Improvement. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.
Åström, Fredrik (2008). Formalizing a discipline: The institutionalization of library and information science research in the Nordic countries", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 64 Iss: 5, 721-737.
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