LIS Education Responds to the Evolving Field

Library and information science (LIS) education has always struggled to find and keep its place in the academic world. As one of the first identified "interdisciplines" or "transdisciplines," it has been rooted in the processes that are required to build, describe, and provide access to collections of objects that are the products of research done in other fields. For instance, the establishment of the first bibliographic databases was not a library innovation but was done by scientists and engineers so that research results could be easily shared in the postwar era. Therefore, LIS has existed within a variety of administrative structures.1 The first independent library school was the Columbia School of Library Economy headed by Melvil(le) Dewey, and many other schools followed the same model. In the 1980s, however, some of the major library schools (at both Columbia and the University of Chicago) closed or became departments within other schools, such as liberal arts, education, business, communication, or computer science. These structuralchanges have continued with some LIS departments having moved from one school to another to another, never finding a disciplinary home that works