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Concept
Library and information science
Summary
Library and information science(s) or studies (LIS) is an interdisciplinary field of study that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and protection/regulation of information, whether in physical or digital forms.
In spite of various trends to merge the two fields, some consider the two original disciplines, library science and information science, to be separate. However, it is common today to use the terms synonymously or to drop the term "library" and to speak about information departments or I-schools. There have also been attempts to revive the concept of documentation and to speak of Library, information and documentation studies (or science).
Tefko Saracevic (1992, p. 13) argued that library science and information science are separate fields:
The common ground between library science and information science, which is a strong one, is in the sharing of their social role and in their general concern with the problems of effective utilization of graphic records. But there are also very significant differences in several critical respects, among them in: (1) selection of problems addressed and in the way they were defined; (2) theoretical questions asked and frameworks established;(3) the nature and degree of experimentation and empirical development and the resulting practical knowledge/competencies derived; (4) tools and approaches used; and (5) the nature and strength of interdisciplinary relations established and the dependence of the progress and evolution of interdisciplinary approaches. All of these differences warrant the conclusion that librarianship and information science are two different fields in a robust interdisciplinary relation, rather than the same field, or one being a special case of the other.
Another indication of the different uses of the two terms are the indexing in UMI's Dissertations Abstracts. In Dissertations Abstracts Online in November 2011 were 4888 dissertations indexed with the descriptor LIBRARY SCIENCE and 9053 with the descriptor INFORMATION SCIENCE.
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