Buy Now: A Competitive Mirror for Library and information Science Scholars, By Asheesh Kamal

Tefko Saracevic (1992, p. 13) argued that library science and information science are separate fields:

 The common ground between library science and information science, which is a strong one, is in the sharing of their social role and in their general concern with the problems of effective utilization of graphic records. But there are also very significant differences in several critical respects, among them in:

(1) Selection of problems addressed and in the way they were defined;

(2) Theoretical questions asked and frameworks established;

(3) The nature and degree of experimentation and empirical development and the resulting practical knowledge/competencies derived;

(4) Tools and approaches used; and

(5) The nature and strength of interdisciplinary relations established and the dependence of the progress and evolution of interdisciplinary approaches.

All of these differences warrant the conclusion that librarianship and information science are two different fields in a strong interdisciplinary relation, rather than one and the same field, or one being a special case of the other.

Another indication of the different uses of the two terms is the indexing in UMI's Dissertations Abstracts. In Dissertations Abstracts Online on November 2011 were 4888 dissertations indexed with the descriptor LIBRARY SCIENCE and 9053 with the descriptor INFORMATION SCIENCE. For the year 2009 the numbers were 104 LIBRARY SCIENCE and 514 INFORMATION SCIENCE. 891 dissertations were indexed with both terms (36 in 2009).

It should be considered that information science grew out of documentation science and therefore has a tradition for considering scientific and scholarly communication, bibliographic databases, subject knowledge and terminology etc. Library science, on the other hand has mostly concentrated on libraries and their internal processes and best practices. It is also relevant to consider that information science used to be done by scientists, while librarianship has been split between public libraries and scholarly research libraries. Library schools have mainly educated librarians for public libraries and not shown much interest in scientific communication and documentation. When information scientists from 1964 entered library schools, they brought with them competencies in relation to information retrieval in subject databases, including concepts such as recall and precision, boolean search techniques, query formulation and related issues. Subject bibliographic databases and citation indexes provided a major step forward in information dissemination - and also in the curriculum at library schools.

Julian Warner (2010) suggests that the information and computer science tradition in information retrieval may broadly be characterized as query transformation, with the query articulated verbally by the user in advance of searching and then transformed by a system into a set of records. From librarianship and indexing, on the other hand, has been an implicit stress on selection power enabling the user to make relevant selections.

Reference:

• Saracevic, Tefko (1992). Information science: origin, evolution and relations. In: Conceptions of library and information science. Historical, empirical and theoretical perspectives. Edited by Pertti Vakkari & Blaise Cronin. London: Taylor Graham (pp. 5-27).
•  Warner, Julian (2010). Human information retrieval.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Thanks for Visiting  Asheesh Kamal Click here and BUY NOW  for UGC NET Exam Preparation Book