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# Library and Information Science

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Library and Information Science (LIS) (as distinguished from information theory) is the "study of stuff having to do with libraries." Strictly speaking, LIS consists of academic studies (most typically surveys) concerning how library resources are used and how people interact with library systems. These studies tend to be specific to particular libraries at particular points in time. Library Science is distinct from Librarianship, which is the practical services rendered by librarians in their day-to-day attempt to meet the needs of library patrons. Librarianship does not generally generate any new knowledge, and its purpose is not to advance any field or discipline. It is only occasionally that librarians engage in Library Science, and then usually incidental to their jobs as librarians. The study of Library Science is, however, part of the requisite training of librarians. "Information" and "documentation" means non-book stuffs that (university) libraries deal with, such as magazines, scientific journals, technical reports, and access to online databases.

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:

- School of Information, University of Michigan, http://www.si.umich.edu/
- Syracuse University School of Information Studies, http://istweb.syr.edu/
- OCLC, http://www.oclc.org/
- American Library Association, http://www.ala.org/
- Canadian Library Association, http://www.cla.ca

Some current LIS issues:

- information explosion
- slow fires
- mass deacidification

Methods of classification for books include the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress catalog scheme.

For "Shannon" et. al., see the science of information theory, that deals with communication systems, encryption, transmission, and "signal to noise ratio". In this sense, "information" is the useful part of "data".

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Last edited July 26, 2001 3:17 pm (diff)
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