Information science and its core concepts: Levels of disagreement Birger Hjørland
What is the name of the discipline?
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- 3.1 Library Economy
- 3.2 Library Science
- 3.3 Bibliography
3 What is the name of the discipline?In this section, I am going to survey ten different candidates (and some additional variations) for the name of the field known as LIS in order to demonstrate that the name itself is one level of disagreement. The purpose of this exercise is to provide a background for the understanding of underlying theoretical tensions in the field, for a given name is not just a neutral designation, but something that involves a certain conceptualization of the field. By presenting and discussion the different labels, I aim to examine and discuss some of the important underlying views regarding the nature of LIS. Let me be clear: I am not claiming that these 10+ names are all synonyms. It is itself a controversial issue which terms are synonyms and which are not, so we cannot exclude any of them in advance. The presentation is also historically oriented because only knowledge about the development of the field provides a sufficient understanding that makes future conceptual decisions well-informed.3.1 Library EconomyWhen Melvil Dewey established the first library school in 1887 at Columbia University in the USA, the field was termed “library economy”. The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) used the term "Library Economy" for class 19 in its first edition , which was published in 1876. In the second edition (and all subsequent editions) it was moved to class 020. The term "Library Economy" was used until (and including) the fourteenth edition (1942). In the fifteenth edition (1951), class 020 was renamed Library Science; from the eighteenth edition (1971) of the DDC to the present, it has been called the “Library & Information Sciences”. “Library economy” is still used today in French and Italian under the forms “bibliothéconomie” and “biblioteconomia”, respectively.7 The term ”library economy” seems to suggest an approach to the problems and activities of LIS that emphasizes practicalities, efficient management, and standards rather than a scholarly, theoretical approach. Brown (1903; 7th edition 1961) is an example of a manual that uses the term “library economy” and the contents of which reflect a thoroughly practicalist approach to the substance of LIS. 3.2 Library ScienceThe term “library science” was first used in Germany, where the first textbook in the field was published between 1807 and 1829 by Martin Schrettinger, who held that library science encompasses “all precepts necessary to the practical organization of a library, provided that they are based on sound principles and reducible to one supreme principle . . . [namely, that] a library must be arranged in such a way as to render speedily accessible whatever books are required to fill every literary need” (translated definition cited from Schrader 1983 p. 36). Schrettinger’s book is a systematic treatise on the principles of librarianship. However, as Vakkari (1994) writes, the scientific nature of Schrettinger’s book is, to say the least, debatable (if “science” is understood as a systematic body of knowledge formed by the scientific method, consisting mainly of theories). It was “professional literature, not science”. Vakkari found, however, that the development of library science as a science in the strictest sense was under way by the time that Graesel (1902) published his handbook on librarianship. The designation "Library Science" was also used by, for example, Pierce Butler, a prominent educator at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Library Science, the first doctorate-granting library school in the United States, who authored a programmatic essay entitled "An Introduction to Library Science" (1933). Cronin (2004) considers the historic and contemporary import of Butler’s book, characterizes the content of each chapter, and critically analyses the central theses. He relates Butler’s positivistic premises, assumptions, and conclusions to the congeries of competing epistemological and ideological standpoints that define current thinking in LIS research and concludes, contrary to Butler’s conceptualization of the field, that ”There is, and can be no such thing as ‘library science’” (Cronin 2004, p. 187), thus denying the possibility of a discipline of that name. "Library science" is thus an old-fashioned designation for the field that we know today as LIS. A problem associated with this label is that core issues related to the development of library services are not specific to libraries, but may be understood as embodying principles common to other kinds of information systems, information services, or documentation practices. For example, the indexing and representation of documents in bibligraphic records is not unique to libraries: indeed, most of the relevant principles used today have not been developed within the library community, but by other communities. This goes both for technical and management issues, which have been developed by, among many others, computer scientists, and for content-oriented issues, such as knowledge organization systems, which have often been developed by subject specialists. A core qualification of librarians is that they possess bibliographic knowledge of literatures. On the other hand, there still are research questions connected with the term "library" (such as library history, library management, and the social roles of libraries), which may not be covered by "information", "documentation", or other labels. This may be the reason why the label “LIS” is still preferred by some. The main objection to this term can be expressed this way: to name the field “library science” corresponds to calling medicine “hospital science”: just as medicine is the study of health, illnesses, and their treatment (and not the study of hospitals), LIS is the study of information and document provision (not of libraries)8. 3.3 BibliographyThe term “bibliography” designates both a kind of document and a field of study. As a kind of document, a bibliography is characterized by the fact that it consists solely of references to other documents. The field of bibliography includes the study of bibliographies and the techniques for constructing them, bibliographical databases, bibliometrics (formerly termed "statistical bibliography"), as well as issues related to scholarly and scientific communication and to the study of texts and the history of the book. The use of the name ”bibliography" to designate the field known as LIS can be traced back to the turn of the last century: for example, Paul Otlet founded the Institut International de Bibliographie in 1895 and, by 1903, was trying to define ”the science of bibliography”. Alan Pollard and S. C. Bradford, who were strongly influenced by Otlet’s vision of ”bibliography”, created The British Society for International Bibliography in 1927, while a Department of Bibliography was founded in 1944 at Tartu University in Estonia (in which a general course in bibliography was mandatory for all students in history and philology). The latter institution changed its name to the Department of Librarianship and in 1993 to the Department of Information Studies at the University of Tallinn. A similar development took place in South Africa where the Department of Librarianship and Bibliography changed its name to the Department of Library Science (cf., Dick, 2002). Further discussions of bibliography include Balsamo (1990); Bates (1992); Besterman (1935); Blum (1980, 1991); Krummel (2010); Macevičiūtė & Janonis (2004); and Woledge (1983). We observe that “bibliography” has been used as a name for what was later termed LIS, and this terminological shift has been accompanied by some voices claiming that “the bibliographical paradigm” is obsolete (e.g., Henri & Hay 1994). Hjørland (2007a) mounts a defense for 'the bibliographical paradigm': there seem to be no sound arguments for denying bibliography the status of being a core concept in the field. What is even more regrettable is that, with the marginalization of the concept of bibliography, there has also come a neglect of the description of documents and information sources for users. For example, in 1986, the American Library Association published a guide to the literature of the social sciences (Webb et al. 1986) which has not been updated since: this betokens a lack of interest in bibliography that, unfortunately, seems to be a general trend.
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