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

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) # ISO certification in India

“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.”. # ISO certification in India

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.^: 106 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. # ISO certification in India

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.^: 15–16 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. # ISO certification in India

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. # ISO certification in India

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. # ISO certification in India

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. # ISO certification in India

The domain analytic approach (e.g., Hjørland suggests that the relevant criteria for making discriminations in information retrieval are scientific and scholarly criteria. In some fields (e.g. evidence-based medicine)^[26] 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. # ISO certification in India

Among other approaches, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice should also be mentioned