Coutesy : Bachelor of Library and Information Science (B.Lib.)

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: 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). # ISO certification in India

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.# ISO certification in India

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.# ISO certification in India

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:# ISO certification in India

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.”# ISO certification in India

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.# ISO certification in India

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).# ISO certification in India

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.# ISO certification in India

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)# ISO certification in India