Ahead of Print in BFP: New article: ‘Mehr als Methoden!’ on library pedagogy theory. Dennis Kranz calls for deeper theoretical grounding in library pedagogy, beyond methods and output metrics. #libraryscience #education #pedagogy #openaccess
Library pedagogy is a growing field of practice, but it remains theoretically underdeveloped. This article analyses the causes of this lack of theoretical grounding and discusses missing connections to educational science and media education discourses. It calls for a theory-informed, reflective understanding of library pedagogy that recognizes libraries as autonomous educational spaces and contributes to the professionalization of pedagogical practice.
“Like the baobab sustains life, libraries sustain community knowledge across generations, preserving equitable access to knowledge as scholarly communication systems develop and evolve.
We must continue to support alternative publishing methods, like APOS, and, in the face of skyrocketing subscription prices and APCs, provide infrastructure for knowledge dissemination.”
— Andiswa Mfengu via Katina Magazine
“The field of scientific communication is in some ways tremendously conservative. When you introduce any innovation, you need to immediately show that it has advantages, that you will gain in prestige, visibility and impact.”
In Katina Magazine , SciELO co-founder Abel Packer discusses the past, present and future of the pioneering platform, which holds the world’s largest collection of Latin American scholarly articles.
SciELO—Scientific Electronic Library Online—has been operating for 28 years. In this interview, co-founder Abel Packer discusses the past, present, and future of the pioneering open access publishing platform and aggregator.
The 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
#2025 #America #Books #Education #History #InformationScience #InformationalDisciplines #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #LibraryScience #LIS #LorcanDempsey #Opinion #Reading #Science #Technology #UnitedStates
From today's NY Times article by John Schwartz titled "A C.I.A. Secret Kept for 35 Years Is Found in the Smithsonian’s Vault"
"Cryptographic science, he argued, could not solve Kryptos — 'but library science could.'"
#LibraryScience FTW!
#Kryptos #CIA #JimSanborn #Smithsonian #archives #libraries
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/science/kryptos-cia-solution-sanborn-auction.html
An accurate description for a #handbook (ie. quick access to essential facts), particularly for anyone unclear on #American #freedom of the #press or inclined towards #bookbanning
#reference #academia #books #libraryscience #censorship
https://www.lisedunetwork.com/handbook-definition-and-meaning/
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