Library and information science
Library and information science ( LIS)Library and Information Sciences is the name used in the Dewey Decimal Classification for class 20 from the 18th edition (1971) to the 22nd edition (2003). are two academic disciplines that study all aspects of the creation, organization, management, communication, and use of recorded information. It underlies a variety of professional activities such as information management, librarianship, and archiving and records management, educating professionals for work in those areas, and carrying out research to improve practice.Coleman, A. (2002). Interdisciplinarity: The Road Ahead for Education in Digital Libraries. D-Lib Magazine, 8:8/9 (July/August).
Library science and information science are two original disciplines; however, they are within the same field of study.Saracevic, Tefko (1992). Information science: origin, evolution and relations. In: Conceptions of library and information science. Historical, empirical and theoretical perspectives. Edited by Pertti Vakkari & Blaise Cronin. London: Taylor Graham (pp. 5–27).Miksa, Francis L. (1992). Library and information science: two paradigms. In: Conceptions of library and information science. Historical, empirical and theoretical perspectives. Edited by Pertti Vakkari & Blaise Cronin. London: Taylor Graham (pp. 229–252). Library science is applied information science,Borko, H. (1968). Information science: What is it? American Documentation, 19(1), 3–5. . as well as a subfield of information science. Due to the strong connection, sometimes the two terms are used synonymously.
Definition
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.
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.
Education and training
Becoming a library staff member does not always need a degree, and in some contexts the difference between being a library staff member and a librarian is the level of education. Most professional library jobs require a professional degree in library science or equivalent. In the United States and Canada the certification usually comes from a master's degree granted by an ALA-accredited institution. 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.
United States and Canada
Types of librarianship
Public
In the United States there are four different types of public libraries: association libraries, municipal public libraries, school district libraries, and special district public libraries. Each receives funding through different sources, each is established by a different set of voters, and not all are subject to municipal civil service governance.
School
Academic
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 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. While libraries receive items individually, archival items will usually become part of the archive's collection as a cohesive group. 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.). 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.
Behavior in an archive differs from behavior in other libraries. In most libraries, items 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 be able view them in a closed reading room.
Special
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).
Some special libraries, such as the CIA Library, may contain classified works. 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.
Preservation
History
17th and 18th century
During the 'golden age of libraries' in the 17th century, 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, and medicine
In 1726 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote Idea of Arranging a Narrower Library.
19th century
Some of the main tools used by LIS to provide access to the resources originated in 19th century to make information accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge. The origin for some of these tools were even earlier.
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 basis of what became the Library of Congress after the first collection was destroyed in the 1814 Burning of Washington.
The first American school of librarianship opened in New York under the leadership of Melvil Dewey, noted for his 1876 decimal classification, on January 5, 1887, as the Columbia College 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.
20th century
Later, the term was used in the title of S. R. Ranganathan's The Five Laws of Library Science, published in 1931, which contains Ranganathan's titular theory. Ranganathan is also credited with the development of the first major analytical-synthetic classification system, the colon classification.
In the United States, Lee Pierce Butler published his 1933 book An Introduction to Library Science (University of Chicago Press), where he advocated for 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.
In 1923, Charles 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.
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.
From library science to LIS
21st century
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." the concept of data literacy has emerged within library and information science as a complement to information literacy to refer to the ability to find, interpret, evaluate, manage, and ethically use data to support research, learning, and informed decision-making.
In the early 2000s, dLIST, Digital Library for Information Sciences and Technology was established. It was the first open access archive for the multidisciplinary 'library and information sciences' building a global scholarly communication consortium and the LIS Commons in order to increase the visibility of research literature, bridge the divide between practice, teaching, and research communities, and improve visibility, uncitedness, and integrate scholarly work in the critical information infrastructures of archives, libraries, and museums.Coleman, A and Bracke, P. (2003). DLIST: Building An International Scholarly Communication Consortium for Library and Information Science. In Murthy, T.A.V. (Editor-in-chief) Mapping Technology on Libraries and People
Social justice, an important ethical value in librarianship and in the 21st century has become an important research area, if not subdiscipline of LIS.Mehra, B., Rioux, K., and Albright, K. S. (2010). "Social Justice in Library and Information Science". In M. J. Bates and M. N. Maack (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (pp. 4820-4836). New York: Taylor & Francis Group.
Important bibliographical databases in LIS are, among others, Social Sciences Citation Index and Library and Information Science Abstracts
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 sub-disciplines are well-established: "The research and teaching/supervision must be within some (and at least one) of these well-established information science areas
A curriculum study by Kajberg & Lørring in 2005 reported a "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 or organizational studies.
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. The concerns of cataloging in the Internet era have gone beyond simple bibliographic descriptions and 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 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. Tools like BASE and Unpaywall automate the search of an academic paper across thousands of repositories by libraries and research institutions.
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 such as 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).
/ref>
/a>
Journals
Conferences
Subfields
Metadata
Knowledge organization
Ethics
See also
Notes
Further reading
External links
|
|
