Library and Information Science Education for the 21st Century

Dr Lyn Robinson City University London

lyn@soi.city.ac.uk

• Defining LIS

• Background to LIS in the UK

• LIS at City University London

• Connecting disciplines

• On the horizon

Defining LIS

• Library science arising from vocational practice in the 18th century

• Information science addressing the concerns of science and technical literature in the 1950s

• Many views and no agreed definition, but most agree commonality of issues of ‘documentation’

21st Century

• General move in LIS curricula away from specific skills training towards delivering the broader knowledge needed to work within our constantly developing information environment

Within the UK

HEFCE: Quality Assurance Agency

• http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/SBS-consultation-librarianship.pdf

CILIP’s Professional Knowledge and Skills Base

LIS at City University London

• LIS is a single subject, which studies the information communication chain, in specific domains, embracing the concepts of domain analysis

• Factors for change include:– Technology

– Economics

– Social factors

– Politics

Information Communication Chain

Creation -> Dissemination -> Management -> Organization/Retrieval -> Use

Hjørland’s 11 approaches

– production of literature guides and subject gateways

– production of special classifications and thesauri

– research on indexing and retrieval in specialist subjects

– empirical user studies

– bibliometric studies

– historical studies

– studies of documents and 'genres'

– epistemological and critical studies

– studies of terminology and special languages, discourse studies

– studies of structures and organisations in the communication of information

– studies in cognition, computing and artificial intelligence

Library Science

Library Science is concerned with all aspects of collection management. This includes the identification and acquisition of resources, understanding the mechanisms by which they are published and disseminated, managed, organised, discovered, retrieved, used and preserved.

Information Science

Information science focuses on all aspects of documentation, (communication chain) often within a specific subject area, and engaging with relevant technologies to solve the problems of information organisation, storage, retrieval, and information architecture.

• Robinson L and Bawden D (2010). Information (and library) science at City University London; fifty years of educational development. Journal of Information Science vol 36, 631-654.

• Robinson L (2009). Information Science: the information chain and domain analysis. Journal of Documentation vol 65(4), 578-591.

• Hjorland B (2002). Domain Analysis in Information Science: Eleven approaches –traditional as well as innovative. Journal of Documentation vol 58(4), 422-462.

Connecting Disciplines

• Computer Science

• Human Computer Interaction

• Publishing

• Digital Humanities

• Data Science

Computer ScienceHuman Computer Interaction

• Information retrieval systems

• Search/discovery

• Information architecture

Factors for change:

• Mobile and pervasive computing [IoT]

• Multisensory internet

Publishing

• Scholarly publishing

• Trade publishing

Factors for change:

• Digital scholarship -> open access

• New models for book publishing

• Changes in magazine/newspaper publishing

• Social media

Digital Humanities

• Humanities computing

Factors for change:

• Mass digitization

• New tools for data analysis (e.g. text mining)

• Changing role of the library• Producer/digital projects

• Support for scholarship

• Lead in scholarly communication

New roles for librarianship:

• Scholarly communications

• Digital humanities librarians

• Data librarianship

• E-Science

• Digital archivists

Data Science

Factors for change:

• Open data

• E-science

• Big data

• Research data

• Data visualisation

On the Horizon

Changes to the information environment

• New ways to understand information– Information theory, unification across domains

• New forms of document– Immersive documents

• New forms of information behaviour– Involving the whole of the communication chain– Participatory engagement, serious leisure– Fanfiction, Coolhunting

• New forms of document dissemination– altmetrics

#citylis 14/15