Content-Type: text/html
The term "Library and Information Science" is not really meant to be broken into these separate pieces. Library and Information Science is a hybrid academic field that grew out of library schools' fight for survival in the electronic age. The politics of academia, issues of status and prestige, issues of perceived obsolescence and doubtless other forces created these programs. Programs in Library and Information Science are interdisciplinary, overlapping with the fields of systems' analysis, computer science, statistics and various parts of the social sciences. Persons interested in the information science of Shannon are more likely to be electrical engineers or mathematicians; persons interested in database design are more likely to be computer scientists. Library and Information Science produces "information specialists" who may be librarians, indexers and abstractors, database managers, multi-media specialists or specialist researchers such as legal, medical or other technical researchers. The field of Library and Information Science is not defined by its output of information specialists, however, but by the "information specialists" who remain in academia teaching and doing research, by its literature, its journals and all the other ways in which an academic discipline is defined, the study of which, by the way, falls within the scope of Library and Information Science!
Important LIS institutions and resources:
Some current LIS issues:
Methods of classification for books include the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress catalog scheme.