Library and information science
This includes organization, access, collection, and regulation of information, both in physical and digital forms.
[8] Rather than classifying information based on nature-oriented elements, as was previously done in his Bavarian library, Schrettinger organized books in alphabetical order.
[9] The first American school for library science was founded by Melvil Dewey at Columbia University in 1887.
[12] Academic courses in library science include collection management, information systems and technology, research methods, user studies, information literacy, cataloging and classification, preservation, reference, statistics and management.
With the mounting acceptance of Wikipedia as a valued and reliable reference source, many libraries, museums, and archives have introduced the role of Wikipedian in residence.
As a result, some universities are including coursework relating to Wikipedia and Knowledge Management in their MLIS programs.
[15] In Australia, a number of institutions offer degrees accepted by the ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association).
School librarianship may also include issues of intellectual freedom, pedagogy, information literacy, and how to build a cooperative curriculum with the teaching staff.
Issues of special importance to the field may include copyright; technology; digital libraries and digital repositories; academic freedom; open access to scholarly works; and specialized knowledge of subject areas important to the institution and the relevant reference works.
Special issues include physical preservation, conservation, and restoration of materials and mass deacidification; specialist catalogs; solo work; access; and appraisal.
Library collections are created by many individuals, as each author and illustrator create their own publication; in contrast, an archive usually collects the records of one person, family, institution, or organization, so the archival items will have fewer sources of authors.
The issues at these libraries are specific to their industries but may include solo work, corporate financing, specialized collection development, and extensive self-promotion to potential patrons.
Their focus is on the management of preservation activities that seek to maintain access to content within books, manuscripts, archival materials, and other library resources.
In the 17th century, during the 'golden age of libraries', publishers and sellers seeking to take advantage of the burgeoning book trade developed descriptive catalogs of their wares for distribution – a practice was adopted and further extrapolated by many libraries of the time to cover areas like philosophy, sciences, linguistics, and medicine[29] Thomas Jefferson, whose library at Monticello consisted of thousands of books, devised a classification system inspired by the Baconian method, which grouped books more or less by subject rather than alphabetically, as it was previously done.
The first textbook in the United States was the Manual of Library Economy by James Duff Brown, published in 1903.
[34] In the United States, Lee Pierce Butler published his 1933 book An Introduction to Library Science (University of Chicago Press), where he advocated for research using quantitative methods and ideas in the social sciences with the aim of using librarianship to address society's information needs.
He was one of the first faculty at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, which changed the structure and focus of education for librarianship in the twentieth century.
William Stetson Merrill's A Code for Classifiers, released in several editions from 1914 to 1939,[36] is an example of a more pragmatic approach, where arguments stemming from in-depth knowledge about each field of study are employed to recommend a system of classification.
It was the first open access archive for the multidisciplinary 'library and information sciences' building a global scholarly communication consortium and the LIS Commons in order to increase the visibility of research literature, bridge the divide between practice, teaching, and research communities, and improve visibility, uncitedness, and integrate scholarly work in the critical information infrastructures of archives, libraries, and museums.
An advertisement for a full Professor in information science at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, spring 2011, provides one view of which sub-disciplines are well-established:[49] "The research and teaching/supervision must be within some (and at least one) of these well-established information science areasA curriculum study by Kajberg & Lørring in 2005[50] reported a "degree of overlap of the ten curricular themes with subject areas in the current curricula of responding LIS schools".
[52] These communities developed taxonomies and controlled vocabularies to describe their knowledge, as well as unique information architectures to communicate these classifications and libraries found themselves as liaison or translator between these metadata systems.
Tools like BASE and Unpaywall automate the search of an academic paper across thousands of repositories by libraries and research institutions.
[53] Library science is very closely related to issues of knowledge organization; however, the latter is a broader term that covers how knowledge is represented and stored (computer science/linguistics), how it might be automatically processed (artificial intelligence), and how it is organized outside the library in global systems such as the internet.
In addition, library science typically refers to a specific community engaged in managing holdings as they are found in university and government libraries, while knowledge organization, in general, refers to this and also to other communities (such as publishers) and other systems (such as the Internet).
[28]: 106 The fundamentals of their study - particularly theory relating to indexing and classification - and many of the main tools used by the disciplines in modern times to provide access to digital resources such as abstracting, metadata, resource description, systematic and alphabetic subject description, and terminology, originated in the 19th century and were developed, in part, to assist in making humanity's intellectual output accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge.
We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.
