DrWebThe informational disciplines – Lorcan Dempsey
At Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, where Shawshank Redemption was filmed.The informational disciplines
This is a further excerpt from my response to the LIS Forward paper. It considers some of the history and contours of the informational disciplines – information science, LIS, library studies. It notes the ongoing blurriness of identity, nomenclature and boundaries.
Lorcan Dempsey, Oct 22, 2025, 20 min read
At Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, where Shawshank Redemption was filmed.This is an excerpt from a longer contribution I made to Responses to the LIS Forward Position Paper: Ensuring a Vibrant Future for LIS in iSchools. [pdf].
It is a sketch only, and somewhat informal, but I thought I would put it here in case of interest. It occasionally references the position paper, and the longer piece of which it is a part. It is also influenced by the context in which it was prepared which was a discussion of the informational disciplines and the iSchool in R1 institutions.
This section could of course be much expanded in a fuller treatment. It is striking to me how much LIS and Information Science can still reference different intellectual, disciplinary or institional boundaries depending on context.
If you wish to reference it, I would be grateful if you cite the full original:
Dempsey, L. (2025). Library Studies, the Informational Disciplines, and the iSchool: Some Remarks Prompted by LIS Forward. In LIS Forward (2025) Responses to the LIS Forward Position Paper: Ensuring a Vibrant Future for LIS in iSchools, The Friday Harbor Papers, Volume 2 pdf
This informational diffusion has given the iSchool great latitude and it can accommodate a great diversity of disciplinary lenses – from the very technical, to the social sciences and humanities, to design, to marketing and communication, to public policy, to critical theory, and so on. The Deans’ interviews suggest that this is at once a great strength and a potential weakness, as the iSchool does not have exclusive ownership of a foundational discipline, but rather a multidisciplinary focus on a hard to define phenomenon. Furthermore, this phenomenon has become an object of study in many other disciplines also.
In this section I discuss the informational disciplines (sic), LIS and Information Science, and conclude with some comments about Library Studies, LIS and the iSchool.
Informational disciplines
Library studies
First, here is a brief note on LS. Buckland (2005) traces the emergence of ‘library science’ to Martin Schrettinger in the early 19th century. The first American library school was opened by Melvil Dewey at Columbia in 1887. Unsurprisingly, a central focus of each of these figures is organization of the collection.
In general, the ‘library school’ has not been a story of optimism and growth. Some closed. Many changed their name to lose ‘library.’ Some were merged into other schools or departments, with various disciplinary emphases.
There is now some variety of provision across types of university and disciplinary configuration. It is common within iSchools who have a library focus to use the term LIS.
Information science(s)
What is Information Science or the Information Sciences? It seems to me that one can identify two very provisional emphases here to help scaffold a discussion. The first is in terms of the emergence of Information Science in the mid twentieth century, with a set of shared concerns, intellectual and personal influences, and professional venues. I label this Information Science Classic in this section, and this is what I usually mean when talking about Information Science (IS). The second is more generic, as Information Science or Information Sciences (or Informatics) is used as a designation of convenience for an academic interest in a range of information-related topics, with or without any specific reference to or acknowledgement of Information Science Classic. We see this emphasis in various places, including in some of the iSchools with non-Library Studies backgrounds (see Cornell or Penn State for example). This may sometimes be used to designate an applied technology focus with more of a social or business dimension than you might typically find in Computer Science.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: The informational disciplines
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