In Search of New Identity for LIS Discipline with Some References to Iran

Abstract

The present paper offers that most of the advocates of discipline of library and information science believe that there is a lack of theoretical foundation and rational identity. The author maintains that there has been an error in defining the subject by confusing library with librarianship. That is many researchers have derived the concept of librarianship from library. Therefore they came to define librarianship as an entity only through the social application and services. If instead, a librarian was assumed to be a person who was usually a scholar, with or without the knowledge of classification properly, and if it was further assumed that before establishing any library, at least there has always been one thoughtful person with the enthusiasm of classifying his own tacit or explicit knowledge in order to retrieve, the concept of librarianship could have been derived from the concept of personal seeking of knowledge, or the need of any knowledgeable person who believes in scientific classification for the sake of retrieval. Thus, there has always been the necessity for scientific classification even if there has not been any formal library. So, I propose that librarianship is more related to the knowledge retrieval and classification which is in the mind of all people specially scholars and learned men before the library, as a place for the collection of books and other materials come to being.

Is there any viable definition for LIS discipline?

“…The author believes that although LIS discipline is important, still there is a lack of theory which holds it back from being prominent among disciplines. One mistake, he supposes, is due to the fact that the idea of librarianship was derived from library as a building (Fadaie, 2008), while the library is created by human real needs for retrieval of information. In other words, it is true that before the industrial age there have been libraries all over the world, and it is true that during the industrial revolution they expanded rapidly and led to the vast collection of books and other documents; but the main fact is that the concepts of categorization and classification for retrieval have been at the center of every body's mindful life, even prior to industrial age.…”

“…I would like to state although I agree with changing the name of the field as Zins suggested, I am not convinced with his designation. To explain more, LIS suffers from the name and naming, especially in some languages such as Persian (Fadaie, 2008). The author in his article In Search of a New Identity for LIS proposed to call it Metadata and Information studies.…”

Library and Information Science Research in China—A Survey Based Analysis of 10 LIS Educational Institutes

“…It is defined in different forms of internal conceptual coherence: some approve that "LIS" is an inter-discipline concept (Weech & Pluzhenskaia, 2005), while others treat it as a standalone discipline (Bawden, Weller, & Haider, 2007;Fadaie, 2008). As for mainland China, according to the classification in the "Catalogs of Disciplines for Professional Degree Commencement and Talent Cultivation", which is formulated by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China in 2013 "library, information and archives management" is a sub-class of Management Science, containing The Journal of Academic Librarianship 41 (2015) 330-340 leaving the NPC out of our consideration, since relative data of this college are not publicly accessible.…”