THELIBRARY PROFESSION PROCLAIMS ITSELF to be a proponent of both the Information Age and of equity for women and people of color. Yet certain features of the Information Age appear to be inhospitable to the goals of gender equity and there is a long history of gender stratification, with men favored for top positions in the profession. Structural changes brought about by the Information Age may...

In recent years, studies of Library and Information Science (LIS) disciplinarity developed original methods for examining the disciplinary composition of the field (Wiggins and Sawyer, 2012; Wu et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2013). However, most of these studies focused on one fragment of the field, specifically, iSchool programs. In order to gain a fuller understanding of LIS development as a who...

Information literacy is seen as a key competency in working and everyday life. For library and information science (LIS) students information literacy is a core competency and taught in many LIS university programs. One challenge herewith is to mediate these skills in the best way. This paper tries to answer the question, how students cope with different learning methods and to which extent the...

The serious leisure perspective is introduced and its relationship to library and information science (LIS) set out. The relationship is twofold: the perspective offers a distinctive approach both to research and to practice in this discipline. That is, the perspective bridges a critical gap that has separated the fields of LIS and leisure studies, manifested in both as scant concern with the c...

In order to design information retrieval (IR) learning environments and instruction, it is important to explore learners' conceptions of the domain to be examined. This study addresses the issue by investigating students' conceptions of IR know-how and its implications for designing learning environments for information retrieval. The focus of this study is the integration of research on IR ins...

The well-documented limitations of journal impact factor rankings and perceptual ratings, the evolving scholarly communication system, the open access movement, and increasing globalization are some reasons that prompted an examination of journal value rather than just impact. Using a single specialized journal established in 1960, about education for the Information professions, this paper dis...

Purpose – To show that the neo-pragmatist position of Richard Rorty, when combined with a sociocultural perspective, provides library and information science (LIS) with a forceful epistemological tool. Design/methodology/approach – Literature-based conceptual analysis of: historical development of pragmatism in relation to other epistemological positions; neo-pragmatism as a non-dualist, both p...

A key issue in teaching and learning in information retrieval – particularly for library and information science students – is the gap in prior knowledge compared with the need for mathematics to conduct and evaluate searches. In this chapter, we examine the use of online Multiple Choice Questions to support these type of students, and narrow this gap between experience and knowledge. We provid...

objective and subjective ways of understanding information corresponds to the conflict between an understanding of information as a thing or a substance versus an understanding of it as a sign. It is a fundamental distinction that involves a whole theory of knowledge, and it has roots back to different metaphors applied in Shannon's information theory. It is argued that a subject-dependent/ sit...