The state of iSchools: an analysis of academic research and graduate education

Abstract

The emergence of the iSchool movement and the establishment of iSchools have helped to reshape the landscape of the library and information science (LIS) discipline. In this article, based on a set of research questions focusing around the research and education efforts of about 25 iSchools, we performed a study using both quantitative and qualitative methods on publically available data obtained from the web. Our results show that iSchools share the same vision and mission of working on relationships between information, people and technology, and have established themselves as the appropriate institutions for researchers from diverse subject areas to study this interdisciplinary integration. Overall, we are seeing an emerging iSchool identity and a defining iField, but there are still many important developments to make.

Cult of the “I”

“…The biggest perceived challenge are disciplinary gaps of knowledge among team members. Wu et al (2012) support these findings in a study of 25 iSchools, as they conclude that iSchools share the vision and mission of working on relationships between information, people and technology and approach this integration through their interdisciplinary research teams.…”

Tradition and Transition: The Journey of an iSchoolDeep in the Heart of Texas

“…8,9 Other articles analyse the different specialties that may be found within an iSchool, such as data curation, archives, eScience, or usability. 10 A special issue of the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science covered iSchools specifically, 11 as did a special section of the Bulletin of the Association of Information Science and Technology. In comparison to these analyses of the iSchool movement as a whole, the current activities of those participating within iSchools may be presented in the proceedings of the annual iConference, now an international conference.…”

Liberating interdisciplinarity from myth. An exploration of the discursive construction of identities in information studies

“…Bibliometric research provides statistical analyses that show increases in authors' and the field's interdisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity is in the DNA of the 65 iSchools. The contexts in which interdisciplinarity is found are diverse, yet mainly revolving around the identity of information studies (Aparac‐Jelušić et al., ; Arafat et al., ; Baradol & Kumbar, ; Bawden, ; Buckland, ; Cronin, , , , ; Druin et al., ; Furner, ; Holland, ; McNicol, ; Nolin & Åstrøm, ; Palmer, ; Radford, ; Saracevic, ; Sugimoto, Ni, Russell, & Bychowski, ; Webber, ; Weech & Pluzhenskaia, ; Wiegand, ; Wilson, ; Winter, ), and the iSchools and the Information Field (Beaton, Jeng, & Champagne, ; Bonnici, Subramaniam, & Burnett, ; Bonnici, Julien, & Burnett, ; Budd & Dumas, ; Burnett & Bonnici, , ; Chu, , ; Dillon, ; Gunawardena, Weber, & Agosto, ; Madsen, ; Madsen & Ho, ; Wedgeworth, ; Wiggins & Sawyer, ; Wu, He, Jiang, Dong, & Vo, ). Despite the ubiquity of interdisciplinarity in the literature, the importance of interdisciplinarity to the identity of information studies and the iSchools organization's commitment to interdisciplinarity, it is noticeable that discussions of what interdisciplinarity is and how it is practiced in research processes are scarce, and boundary work is largely ignored in the literature.…”