It all starts with a question: What the heck is Library and Information Science?
I’m Peter, and this is stacks & facts.
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When you’re flicking through twitter, skimming the news, or tucking into a good book, you’re
doing so because those things have information that you want.
Information, that mineral we crave that lets us understand the world and feel good about
the decisions we make.
While fields like Physics, Chemistry, and Literature have a role in creating that information
and shaping our views of the world, Library and Information Science, or LIS for short,
is more concerned with the storage, retrieval, and usage of that information.
Folks in the field of LIS look at the systems, structures, and processes that people rely
on to find, store, and share information -- whatever shape that information might take.
While we might have a passing interest in the content itself, academically that interest
usually only extends to how particular information shapes the behavior of those looking for it.
Because of this, LIS is highly interdisciplinary, and touches everything from biology to psychology,
from physics to linguistics.
Dr. Marcia Bates, Professor Emerita at UCLA put it best: “In short,” she says, “the
documentary products of human activity themselves form a universe deserving of study, and study
of that universe—and how human beings produce it, seek it, retrieve it, and use it--is the
intellectual domain of information science.”
Natural science’s realm is the natural world, social science’s realm is the social world,
and the realm of humanities is creative and artistic endeavor.
LIS’s realm, then, is the *output* of those other studies.
To quote, “the world of recorded information produced by human agency.”
Now depending on who you ask and the context that you’re asking in, LIS is either it’s
own field, the merging of two separate-but-related fields, or just a fancy renaming of Library
Science to make it feel more hip and modern.
I, of course, won’t be taking a stand on that either way -- there are plenty of other
hornets’ nests to shake up.
But!
I will talk about Library Science and Information Science as separate fields to begin with,
because I think the distinction is an important one to make.
Huma Malik, a librarian at the University of Preston in Islamabad, Pakistan, put together
an excellent presentation that compares the two fields (link in the dooblydoo).
She gives the definition of Library Science as the study of collecting, preserving, and
cataloging books and other documents in libraries, and information science as the study of processes
for storing and retrieving information, especially scientific or technical information.
She also does a great job at highlighting the similarities and differences between the
two fields.
You can break it down like this: Location-based versus location-less
Document-based versus content-based Information Organization versus Information
Behavior
Or, think of it like this: they’re two sides of the same coin, where Information Science
leans toward theory around information, while Library Science is more concerned with the
practices of how to put people into contact with information.
An information scientist might look at whether readers of different genres of literature
have preferences in the medium (kindle vs paper?), whereas a librarian might break their
science fiction holdings into sub-genres like cyberpunk and serial fiction to help patrons
find what they want more easily.
While an information scientist might research how the position of information on a website
determines whether or not it gets looked at, a librarian may look at what books get checked
out most often, to decide what parts of the collection to expand, given their building’s
capacity.
But of course, Information Science is more than just research, and Library Science is
more than just practice.
Information Scientists will study how people use a search engine, and find that very few
people ever go beyond page two of the results.
They’ll ask hard questions like, “who gets to be on those first two pages?
How does that disenfranchise less popular but more accurate sources?
How do entities manipulate those results to effect what people deem true?”
Librarians meanwhile work to bring down systemic barriers that members in their communities
might face when it comes to using the library.
They ask hard questions like, “who *doesn’t* feel welcome in our space?
Do fines really encourage responsible use of our collections, or do they scare away
the vulnerable populations that need us most?
How can we downsize our physical collections to make more space for computers, without
hurting our current patrons?”
And, both Information Scientists and Librarians are equally concerned with things like promoting
Open Access: this could mean pulling research from behind paywalls and into the public realm,
or making sure that the quality of a school’s textbook isn’t dependent on how much money
it gets, or bringing government data into the public eye to keep governments and other
big entities accountable.
Those are some of the big ideas in LIS: Interface Design, community-led librarianship, and Open
Access.
But given that Library Science and Information Science seem to have somewhat different purposes,
why have the two fields found themselves merged?
Fundamentally, it’s because they inform each other.
Information Science in its current form really started to take off in the early- to mid-
20th century.
This is around when folks started realizing that the automated processing of information
that computers made possible could revolutionize how information itself functioned.
Librarianship, meanwhile, has been around for as long as people have had records to
store.
Figuring out how to classify and organize these collections, and how to make them searchable
in useful ways, has always been the domain of librarians and archivists.
The transition from analog to digital brought new challenges to librarianship: where do
you store a thing that can only be accessed through a computer terminal?
More importantly, how do you give as many people as possible access to that?
What’s the digital equivalent of a wet book?
In this way, LIS coming together worked out.
Librarians brought a firm understanding of principles like genre, indexing, classification,
and preservation to information scientists, who could then apply that institutional knowledge
to their own work.
In turn, information scientists were able to re-imagine information as a thing, and
lead to new developments in how it’s worked with, organized, and stored.
To evolve with the changing information landscape, university faculties and schools of Library
Science brought information science into their titles starting in the 60’s.
The MLS degree became the MLIS, and its scope grew.
This was also a recognition that the scope of information practices extends beyond libraries:
MLIS grads can become UX designers, intelligence analysts, and chief information officers.
They work with textile samples, wines, and 3d printers.
Basically, information takes many shapes -- and a degree in Library and Information Science
lets you understand it and work with it, regardless of its form.
At its heart, Library and Information Science is all about taking information in all of
its forms and doing something useful with it, so that it’s useful to others.
That can mean looking at how people play with it, or devising better ways of organizing
it, or helping make it accessible to the world.
Let me know in the comments below what role you see for LIS in today’s world, or tweet
at me -- @StacksEtFacts.
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Until next time, thanks for checking this out (get it? cuz libraries?)... and don’t
forget to ask questions.