This presentation will consider the recent development of library and information science as an academic discipline, and the consequent changes required to library school curricula, in order to prepare professional practitioners for employment in today’s information society. These changes, led primarily by technological developments, include the need for consideration of new forms of documents, new methods of dissemination, new information behaviour patterns and increasing demand for novel information architectures. Alongside changes in technology, we can see the emergence of overlap with companion disciplines such as the digital humanities, and these must be accommodated, alongside more obvious connections, such as those with computer science. In conclusion from all of this, we can see that a course focused solely on traditional workplace skills will be insufficient for today’s portfolio-based workforce. We must have an emphasis on thinking skills, new literacies, and resilience, so that we prepare our graduates for employment beyond their first position.

1. Library and Information Science
Education for the 21st Century
Dr Lyn Robinson
City University London
lyn@soi.city.ac.uk

3. • Defining LIS
• Background to LIS in the UK
• LIS at City University London
• Connecting disciplines
• On the horizon

4. Defining LIS

5. • 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’

6. 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

7. Within the UK

8. HEFCE: Quality Assurance Agency

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

10. CILIP’s Professional Knowledge and
Skills Base

12. LIS at City University London

13. • 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

14. Information Communication Chain
Creation -> Dissemination -> Management -> Organization/Retrieval -> Use

15. 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

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. • 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.

19. Connecting Disciplines

20. • Computer Science
• Human Computer Interaction
• Publishing
• Digital Humanities
• Data Science

21. Computer Science
Human Computer Interaction
• Information retrieval systems
• Search/discovery
• Information architecture
Factors for change:
• Mobile and pervasive computing [IoT]
• Multisensory internet

22. Publishing
• Scholarly publishing
• Trade publishing
Factors for change:
• Digital scholarship -> open access
• New models for book publishing
• Changes in magazine/newspaper publishing
• Social media

23. 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

24. New roles for librarianship:
• Scholarly communications
• Digital humanities librarians
• Data librarianship
• E-Science
• Digital archivists

26. Data Science
Factors for change:
• Open data
• E-science
• Big data
• Research data
• Data visualisation

27. On the Horizon

28. 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

29. #citylis 14/15