LIS Education in the Digital Age for an African Agenda

Abstract

To provide an exposé of digital-age library and information science (LIS) education for an African agenda, this paper adopts an emergent qualitative research design by drawing on the literature on LIS education in Africa. It also draws on data gleaned from a survey of heads of schools of LIS in South Africa, and from content analyses of LIS school websites in South Africa and selected parts of the continent. The paper locates its narrative within Abbott's chaos of disciplines theory and concludes that the LIS discipline's "interstitial nature," its "fractal distinctions in time," and the resulting chaos of disciplines should not be seen as a crisis for LIS education in Africa and globally, but as an opportunity for a paradigm shift to broaden the LIS disciplinary domain and to stake an intellectual claim on this extended domain-and so contribute to the growth and development of LIS services in Africa within the context of an African development agenda. Research Design An emergent qualitative research design is appropriate for examining African library and information science (LIS) education in the digital age because it allows the researcher "to learn about the problem or issue. .. after the researcher enters the field and begins to collect data" (Creswell, 2014, p. 186). This is different from a positivist approach, which requires the "research design to be decided on before data are collected" (Wel

Future LIS Education and Evolving Global Competency Requirements for the Digital Information Environment: An Epistemological Overview

“…For example, Bonnici, Subramaniam and Burnett (2009) used Abbott's Chaos of Disciplines theory to analyze how distinct a departure the iSchool movement is from traditional LIS education in North America. Raju (2015), in her study, used the Chaos of Disciplines theory to examine if LIS education in the digital age on the African continent is in crisis or if it is presented with an opportunity to broaden its disciplinary domain. She used it, again, in 2017 (Raju, 2017a) as theoretical support for an enquiry into the extent of IT knowledge and skills required by academic librarians in the digital library environment.…”

How international is your LIS/IS program in the global higher education era?

“…LIS/IS programs in South Africa also face considerable pressure for the Africanization of programmes, local relevance, addressing indigenous knowledge and knowledge systems (Botha, 2007;Dube, 2012;Ngulube, Dube & Mhlongo, 2015;Raju, 2015). The cultural diversity to be accommodated is reflected in the 11 South African official languages.…”

Incorporating digital scholarship content in South African library and information science schools

“…The incorporation of digital scholarship is evitable in LIS schools as academic and special research libraries have already adopted these emerging trends (Raju, 2015). There is limited evidence of the incorporation of digital scholarship in the LIS curricula in South Africa (Sibiya and Ngulube, 2023).…”

“…Generally, library and information science education should encompass emerging digital scholarship content to meet the requirements of the current job market. South African LIS schools are struggling to offer relevant digital scholarship skills and knowledge needed in the digital environment (Raju, 2015; Wood and Evans, 2018). The failure of LIS schools to offer education on digital scholarship could lead to the displacement from their positions of LIS professionals by either information technologists, computer scientists or information systems specialists (Raju, 2015; Ayinde and Kirkwood, 2020).…”

“…Attached to that Wexelbaum (2016) cites that web design, computer programming, text coding, geographic systems and mapping, data analysis and storage, app development, online gaming and 3D animation are digitals scholarship expertise. Raju (2015) adds that creating and providing access to digital documents and data, metadata handling, managing institutional repositories (IRs), digital curation and research data management (RDM) are key components of digital scholarship. Ideally, digital scholarship education in LIS schools should include these components in the curricular.…”