Location, Location, Location: The Impact of Organisational Structure on Library and Information Studies Programmes

ABSTRACT

As a discipline, library and information studies (LIS) is often considered to lack visibility and a clear identity within academia. Poor understanding of the nature of our field/discipline and our relatively small size has led to LIS programmes being partnered with a range of other subjects, located within diverse faculty structures. We suggest that this can impact on the development of both LIS curricula and research as LIS academics are brought into interdisciplinary relationships with school and faculty colleagues. The study reported here analysed the location of a sample of LIS programmes from New Zealand, Australia, the United States of America, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Singapore. Compared with previous studies, we found a higher number of ‘stand-alone’ schools as well as some national differences. We reflect on our experiences in a Business School, partnered with the information systems discipline, noting some key differences in boundary setting, field configuration, the use of theory in our research and links with practitioner communities. We conclude that there is a vicious circle in that the LIS discipline’s lack of clear identity leads to it being partnered with disparate other fields which, in turn, further weakens its identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Library and information science
• education
• curricula
• LIS research

Introduction

The library and information studies (LIS) discipline (or field) is by nature interdisciplinary, drawing on theories and concepts from across the social sciences, education, computer science and business and management. While some consider this heterogeneity a strength which enables scholars in our discipline to align themselves and draw on a wide range of appropriate epistemological and methodological traditions (Nolin & Åström, 2010), others contend that this ‘pick and mix’ approach is a weakness that exposes the lack of robust theoretical underpinnings to LIS (Summers, Oppenheim, McKnight, Kinnell, & Meadows, 1999).

The development of the iSchools movement can be viewed as an attempt to address the perceived weak theoretical underpinnings of the LIS discipline by strengthening and consolidating it through an emphasis on information work beyond libraries with a focus on ‘the growing information, technology and knowledge economy’ (iSchools, n.d). The iSchool movement emerged in the United States during the first decade of the new millennium and now includes over 80 schools around the world (iSchools, n.d.). Schools teaching and researching in the iField can apply to be recognised as an iSchool at one of three levels, depending on the nature of the programmes they offer and their research profiles. Holmberg, Tsou, and Sugimoto (2013) describe how, initially, the staff of iSchools were predominantly from the LIS discipline but note that as the movement has grown, there has been less emphasis on LIS in both programme content and faculty appointments. Holmberg et al. (2013) also emphasise that the notion of inter-disciplinarity is central to any discussion of iSchools. With a clear emphasis on inter-disciplinarity, it was hoped that the iSchools movement could lead the way in transforming the LIS discipline and bring it closer to cognate disciplines and, in the process, make it much easier to identify a suitable location for LIS within an academic institution. Although the distinctiveness of iSchools’ curricula and staff research, in comparison with other LIS schools has been questioned (Golub, Hansson, & Selden, 2017), the iSchools’ community certainly highlights a move away from an interest in paper and media-based information towards ‘information as thing’ (Bruce, 2011), characterising the iField as focusing on ‘the relationship between information, technology and people’ (Larsen, 2008).¹ Despite these efforts by the iSchool movement to clarify the nature of the iField, however, both iSchools and more ‘traditional’ LIS schools continue to be located in a wide range of faculties and, in some cases, partnered with programmes from various other disciplines. The distribution of those teaching LIS programmes across different faculties suggests that university managers do not have a clear view of the nature of the LIS discipline and that one of the avowed intentions of the original iSchool members to ‘explain Information Science to [the] provost’ (Larsen, 2008, p. 2) has not been accomplished.

The placement of LIS within the university structure is of importance and interest for two reasons. First because it must reflect institutional views of the discipline that will result either in a purposive placement of LIS with what senior university managers perceive to be cognate disciplines or a random placement that is most likely an indication of a lack of knowledge (or concern) about the LIS discipline. Second, the result of the placement decision can impact on the extent and nature of interdisciplinary collaboration and support for both teaching and research purposes. In support of this second point, Nolin and Åström (2010, p. 15) suggest LIS programmes are taken in ‘vastly different directions’ by their placement and co-location with a range of different disciplines.

This study was prompted by reflections by LIS staff at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand on their experiences of being co-located with colleagues teaching information systems (IS), within a School of Information Management as part of Victoria Business School (VBS). It explores the location of LIS programmes within universities and academic institutions and the extent to which their placement impacts on the nature of those programmes and any partner programmes, focusing particularly on those programmes attached to a business school or faculty. Using our own experiences and location with IS as an example, we explore issues around disciplinary boundaries and differences raised by previous work in this area. The questions driving the study are:

• In which larger academic units are LIS programmes placed internationally?

• Are there any discernible trends in the location of LIS programmes within university structures?

• Is there evidence that LIS programmes located in different schools/faculties differ in the approaches they take and/or subjects/courses they offer?

• Is there evidence that reciprocal relationships in teaching have developed between LIS programmes and the other programmes in the same school/faculty?

• What is the impact in terms of interdisciplinary convergence and collaboration and what does this mean for the future direction and identity of the LIS discipline?

Answers to these questions should throw light on the current strength of the LIS discipline. If LIS teaching and research is consistently located alongside a narrow range of other disciplines it suggests that the LIS discipline is perceived as clear and robust. If there is evidence of much sharing of teaching across disciplines, this shows an element of respect from academics in other disciplines. If the opposite is found and there is no obvious trend for placing LIS within the institution, and if there is little evidence of interdisciplinary teaching, it points to the need for much more work on delineating and explaining the LIS discipline.

Terminology: There is a wide variety of terms used to describe the various levels of university organisational structures around the world. In this article, the term ‘school’ is used to denote the lowest level of organisational structure within universities; in some countries the term ‘department’ may be used. We use the term ‘faculty’ to refer to the grouping of schools at the next level of the hierarchy; the terms ‘school’ or ‘college’ are used in some education systems for this category of university organisational unit.

Related Work

Analysis of the location of the LIS subject within higher education institutions invariably involves consideration of the nature of LIS as a discipline and profession. There is large corpus of previous work focusing on questions relating to LIS professional and disciplinary identity; this section will explore those considered most relevant to the presentation of results which follows. Webber (2003) provides a good overview of issues relating to information science as a discipline, including the question of whether it is a discipline at all. She categorises the arguments rejecting it as a discipline into three: (1) those contending it is not a true science; (2) those stating there is inadequate theory or no unifying theory and (3) those suggesting its boundaries are unclear. On this last point, in 1999 Marcia Bates described information science as orthogonal to conventional academic disciplines, in that it cuts across those ‘content’ disciplines (p. 1044). She proposed that information science is similar to other metadisciplines such as education and journalism because they all cover and ‘do something’ with the subject matter of conventional disciplines. Subjective perception suggests, however, that within university structures, education and journalism do not tend to suffer the same fate as the LIS discipline of being dispersed across a wide range of different schools and faculties; education is often a faculty in its own right and journalism is commonly part of a larger ‘communications and media’ group.

There is a theme in the literature pointing at the intermingling of elements from LIS with concepts from other disciplines. From some authors, there is a sense of disgruntlement that concepts and approaches central to LIS, such as principles of information flows/channels and information processing, are now being ‘discovered’ by a range of other disciplines and profession. Bates (1999, p. 1044), for example, writes of our expertise in ‘the form and organisation of information’ being ignored while others discover what we have known for decades, and Cannon (2017) contends that other professions are having a profound impact on discussions of the role of information on society while LIS is ignored. Commentators have suggested that this incursion by scholars from other fields into LIS inhibits the development of a unifying and identifiable theoretical base for our discipline with Weller and Haider (2007) writing of a lack of cohesion resulting from the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of LIS students and academics. Others have suggested that one of the inevitable impacts of this is that scholars from LIS adopt theories from other disciplines and that this has a similarly diluting effect on the distinctiveness and identity of the discipline. As early as 1936, there were contentions that the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago was losing its sense of balance due to the incursion of ideas from sociology and psychology (Harris, 1986) and many contend that this trend has intensified. Hjørland (2014) calls the current theoretical landscape of LIS ‘chaotic’ and ‘fragmented’ while Dillon (1995) suggests that rather than ‘merely borrowing’ theories from other disciplines, information science should lead the development of theoretical perspectives on the human use of information technology. Meadows (1990) notes, however, that other fields, such as engineering, often adopt theories from outside their discipline without the hand-wringing that seems to characterise the process in LIS.

In response to these concerns, Nolin and Åström (2010) emphasise the importance of drawing clearly defined epistemological boundaries for LIS. Indeed, the need to explain our discipline and its theoretical foundations more clearly to others is another refrain in previous work on this topic. Bates (2015), for example, writes of the information fields as being ‘seriously misunderstood’ by society and other disciplines. As noted above, one of stated motivations behind the establishment of the iSchools movement was a desire to explain more effectively the nature of the information science discipline. The subsequent growth and spread of the iSchool caucus prompted the publication of many works analysing the nature and positioning of the field. Dillon (2012) identified three key elements that he said distinguished iSchools from other LIS schools: (1) a shift from an agency-centric to a contextual study of information, people and technology; (2) inter-disciplinarity and (3) an emphasis on research activity and productivity rather than professional education. King (2006), however, believes that iSchool identity is still elusive and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Dillon’s (2012) emphasis on the value of interdisciplinary work for the iField is of interest, because, as noted in the Introduction, the multi- and inter-disciplinarity of LIS have been recognised as both a strength and weakness of the field with Buckland (2012, p. 5) cautioning that ‘words beginning with “inter” commonly imply a position of weakness’. Bonnici, Subramaniam, and Burnett (2009, p. 264) describe the LIS field as ‘an academic patchwork quilt of internal conflict’ explaining that it is ‘not good at excluding, a discipline of many topics’. Interestingly, in a later paper discussing iSchools specifically, Burnett and Bonnici (2013) seem to identify the increasingly divergent methods and approaches adopted by iField researchers and educators as a strength, supporting both inter- and intra-organisational collaboration. Bruce (2011) agrees, suggesting that multi- and inter-disciplinary ways of working are a hallmark of information researchers and lead to novel approaches to studying information. Similarly, Webber (2003, p. 203) notes that with multi-disciplinarity being considered one of the keys to stimulating creativity within academia, information science is well placed as ‘a discipline for the future’.

In light of the field’s embrace of inter- and multi-disciplinarity, the question arises of where the LIS subject belongs within the university organisational structure to take most advantage of synergies with cognate disciplines. A trend of restructuring and consolidating university teaching units into fewer and larger schools and faculties, primarily for efficiency imperatives (Hogan, 2012), has also been justified on the grounds of disciplinary change. Taylor (2006) discusses the emergence of new interdisciplinary groupings which were previously constrained by rigid structures with fixed boundaries around discipline groups and subjects. Specifically in relation to LIS, Wilson, Kennan, Boell, and Willard (2012, p. 23) note that ‘academic isolation’ led to the closure of LIS schools in both the United States and Australia. The importance of LIS academics demonstrating how they can work productively with those from other fields seems clear, therefore. Of course, colleagues do not have to be physically located close together to collaborate but there are surely advantages for both teaching and research collaborations when they meet regularly either through chance encounters in the workplace or more formal settings such as meetings and research seminars. If LIS is an orthogonal or metadiscipline as Bates (1999) suggests, it should be placed in an academic context which would enable its scholars to link with those disciplines with which it has the most affinity. This will give LIS academics the opportunity both to contribute to teaching and research programmes other than LIS and to absorb theories and concepts from other disciplines. It could, then, help to broaden the theoretical base of LIS, the weakness of which has been highlighted by authors such as Webber (2003). Cannon (2017) notes that the placement of LIS teaching units is likely to be attributable primarily to local socio-cultural factors, however, and, looking at the diversity of LIS home faculties noted by Borup Larsen (2005) and Wilson et al. (2012), we might conclude that expedience, rather than a deliberate strategy to capitalise on disciplinary synergies, drives location. In Genoni’s (2005, p. 18) terms, LIS schools have been ‘forced into alliances with other disciplines’ as a result of higher education reform.

The study by Borup Larsen (2005) gathered empirical data on the location of European LIS schools, categorising them by organisational affiliation. She found that 25 per cent of the schools offered a programme within a larger school, 59 per cent functioned as a separate school within a faculty, 10 per cent had the status of an independent faculty/school and 6 per cent were independent academic institutions. Those programmes or schools that were part of a larger faculty were then categorised. Her results showed:

• 35% in Arts and Humanities

• 15% in Social Sciences

• 13% in Communications and Media

• 9% in Business/Management

• 4% in Computer Science

• 24% in ‘other’

She noted that because different academic subjects are funded very differently, the LIS education field is subject to varying financial conditions dependent on their local organisational affiliation and conditions.

Wilson et al.’s (2012) overview of Australian academic LIS schools in 2008 found that the 10 LIS programmes were distributed among:

• Information Technology, Computing/Communications (5 schools);

• Education (2);

• Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences (2) and

• Business, Commerce, Economics (1).

Wilson et al. (2012) suggest that while these relationships have the potential to enrich LIS, they also run the risk of diluting its unique characteristics and lowering its visibility for both students and their potential future employers. They conclude that the diversity of location of LIS within the university structure indicates that the discipline is not considered to be of equal status as other academic subjects but more akin to a sub-discipline within broader fields. The study reported here explored some of these issues via an analysis of university websites.

Methodology

Alongside a literature review of previous relevant work, a content analysis of university websites was undertaken in October 2017. The analysis was restricted to English-language websites from New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Singapore because these are the education systems with which the research team are most familiar. The analysis was a two-stage process.

Stage (1)

Lists of LIS schools and iSchools accredited by professional LIS associations were used to identify those in the countries listed above. A ‘sweep’ of their university websites focused on where the LIS school was located in the faculty structure, the other schools included in the faculty, any other disciplines co-located with LIS in the school and the postgraduate programmes taught in the school (excluding higher degrees by research). 94 LIS schools were analysed in this way.

Stage (2)

A more detailed analysis considered a limited number of LIS postgraduate programmes in more depth, analysing the content of the curriculum to try to identify whether programmes in different faculties and partnered with other disciplines had consistent distinguishing features. The sampling strategy for the second stage analysis was purposive in two ways. First, four programmes chosen were in business/management faculties to make the comparison with VUW’s programme more directly applicable. All the Australian and New Zealand postgraduate programmes (6) were analysed and another 9 programmes from a range of different faculties and countries were analysed to provide maximum variation, including some with affiliation with the iCaucus. A total of 19 programmes were analysed in detail in total. The programme and course descriptions on university websites were reviewed and the content was categorised using a framework based on the Australian Library and Information Association’s (ALIA) Foundation Knowledge, Skills and Attributes relevant to Information Professionals working in Archives, Libraries and Records Management (Australian Library and Information Association, 2015) with an additional category of ‘Generation of Knowledge’ so that understanding of research methods was explicitly included as a separate category rather than as a sub-topic under the ‘Employability’ heading. This framework was considered sufficiently detailed to enable analysis and classification of courses.

Limitations

The lists used to identify the schools and programmes may not be fully up to date, which could have led to some in the targeted countries being excluded from analysis. It is acknowledged that many of the course descriptions available on websites are summaries and may not fully reflect the content of the courses and/or they may not be fully up to date. Similarly, programme descriptions may exclude special topics and other non-permanent content. Having identified the LIS programme and the school within which it was located, because of the structure and architecture of some university websites it was not always possible to identify the larger organisational unit or faculty. The use of multiple coders to categorise the programmes against the ALIA competencies framework raises the usual issues of comparability of coding. All these factors could have compromised the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the data.

Results

Table 1 gives the results of stage 1 of the research process as described in the Methodology section. As illustrated, LIS programmes were located in a range of faculties although, somewhat surprisingly, stand-alone schools were most common. While some disquiet has been expressed about the incorporation of LIS programmes within larger units (Hallam, 2007), many independent schools remain. An alternative explanation is that the iSchool movement has succeeded in raising the profile and status of the field and there has been a subsequent increase in information schools incorporating the LIS discipline alongside other information-rich disciplines. In Indiana University Bloomington, for example, information science is combined with computing and engineering in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Other iSchools are not so broad, often combining information studies with information management and, increasingly, data science (e.g. Syracuse University).

Table 1. Faculty location of LIS schools and programmes.

Location	Total	%
Stand-alone	21	22%
Combination	17	18%
Education	12	13%
Communication	9	10%
Business/Management	8	9%
IT/Engineering	8	9%
Arts	6	6%
Humanities	4	4%
Social Sciences	5	5%
Other	2	2%
Science	2	2%
Grand Total	94	100%

Compared with Borup Larsen’s work in 2005, we see far fewer LIS schools located in faculties of arts and humanities (10% compared with 35%) and in faculties of social science (5% compared with 15%). It should be noted, however, that the move towards larger academic units has meant a range of groupings of subjects and disciplines within one unit so that in our ‘combination’ category there are faculties of arts and humanities (3); arts, humanities and social science (3); and arts and sciences, including liberal arts and applied sciences (6). Otherwise, the percentages of schools within faculties are broadly similar to Borup Larsen’s study, the one outlier being our ‘independent’ category. Again, this may be reflective of the momentum of the iSchools movement since Borup Larsen’s work over 10 years ago. Another noteworthy element in our data is the relatively high percentage of LIS schools within education faculties. Interestingly, the percentage of schools in business or management faculties in both Borup Larsen’s and our work is the same – 9%.

Looking at the next level in the university organisational structure, that of school or department, LIS programmes appear to be co-located with a range of other disciplines. There are some noticeable differences by country. In Australia, for example, none of the titles of the schools includes the word ‘library’ and only one (Charles Sturt) include the phrase ‘information studies’. The situation is similar in the United Kingdom although these terms occur slightly more frequently. In South Africa, there is again a wide variation of school names but the terms ‘information studies’ and ‘library’ are more common. In Canada, ‘information studies’ and ‘library studies’ are used more frequently and in the U.S. schools are most commonly titled with some combination of the words ‘information’ and/or ‘library’ and ‘studies’ or ‘science’. The tendency to link LIS with computer science within schools is noticeable in the U.K. sample and this partnering of LIS with the discipline of computer science or information technology could be taken as recognition of the centrality of digital technologies and information systems to the practice and understanding of librarianship and information science. Other pairings perhaps demonstrate more conventional views of the LIS discipline, for example with communication studies and culture.

The second stage of our analysis (see ‘Methodology’) focused on the extent to which the placement of LIS had an impact on the content or direction of the curriculum of a sample of schools/programmes, including the opportunity to include specialisms drawn from the disciplines with which they were linked or partnered at faculty or school level. Our analysis indicates that there was little interchange of this kind. The LIS programmes reviewed covered the ALIA Framework well but there was limited evidence of the inclusion of courses or subjects from the partner disciplines. The one programme that we analysed that we considered showed a more integrated approach is that from Syracuse University. The school offers multiple pathways through their master’s programmes as well as focused certificates and specialisations indicating quite a high degree of school and course offerings integration.

It would seem, therefore, that the benefits of interdisciplinary alliances are not being widely realised in terms of curriculum expansion. However, the literature cited above exploring the multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of LIS tends to focus primarily on research rather than teaching collaboration and it should be noted that our analysis covered only the teaching programmes. There may be more evidence of interdisciplinary relationships and interchange in schools’ research activities, which was beyond the scope of this study.

Discussion

Our results indicate that schools teaching LIS in universities feature in diverse organisational arrangements with a range of other disciplines and academic subjects. Here we will comment on only one finding which is that compared with Borup Larsen’s (2005) previous work, a higher number of LIS programmes were located in education faculties. This might point to a difference in the LIS traditions between Europe and Anglophone countries, though Boelens (2010) found the situation with regard to the training of school librarians and teacher librarians in Europe unclear, with most European LIS tertiary education providers offering general programmes which they felt would equip their graduates to work in a range of library settings including school libraries. In the United States, by contrast, many LIS schools offer specific qualifications in school librarianship and teacher librarianship. Education for school librarians traditionally blends elements from LIS and education (Church, Dickinson, Everhart, & Howard, 2012, p. 208) so where that is part of the LIS programme the placement of LIS with education makes complete sense, though we noted that in some universities there was no apparent convergence between the two at all.

The era of stand-alone library schools is not completely over and, in fact, the rise of the iSchools has increased the number of faculties with a focus specifically on the iField disciplines. Overall, higher education reform around the globe has led to the creation of large, diverse faculties, which pair the LIS discipline with various other subjects. There is limited evidence that this has led to substantial curriculum change or the ‘watering down’ of the LIS curriculum due to the inclusion of other disciplinary content. We could find no evidence to confirm Genoni’s (2005) contention that the demise of the autonomous LIS school and the disciplinary alliances resulting from the restructuring of higher education have led to noticeable curriculum changes and a loss of control over course content. The role of library associations may be important in this regard. Their approaches to course accreditation or recognition, identifying the essential elements of professional knowledge that LIS programmes should cover, mean that the core curriculum is reasonably standard. There is sometimes the potential for broadening out into other disciplinary areas with the inclusion of special topics or optional courses although scope for this may be limited depending on the size of the core curriculum and other considerations such as credit weightings and timetabling. Perhaps because of these factors, we could identify few instances where school or faculty partnerships had opened up substantial cross-disciplinary opportunities for students in terms of course offerings While there have undoubtedly been changes to the LIS curriculum over the years, we suggest that this can be attributed primarily to the development of professional practice and the knowledge base required to operate effectively in a rapidly changing information environment.

Nevertheless, the invisibility and lack of identity of the LIS discipline remains an issue. While the establishment of the iSchool movement might have raised the profile of our field in some institutions, the continued distribution of LIS programmes across diverse schools and faculties suggests that senior university managers generally remain unclear about the nature of our discipline and with which other subjects it would best be linked for both teaching and research purposes, or if some believe they know where to place LIS there is little agreement about the best location. If our subject is considered difficult to place, we can become isolated with little interest from other disciplines in collaboration for research or teaching purposes. A lack of support from elsewhere in the institution can make it easier to cut or close programmes altogether. Taking Bates’s (1999) notion of information science as an orthogonal metadiscipline to its natural conclusion, we might conclude that the location of our programmes and staff is unimportant given that it cuts across other disciplines. However, most in the field would accept that there are cognate disciplines with which LIS will have closer disciplinary affinity. As Cronin and Meho (2008) note when discussing intellectual trading between disciplines, while interchange between information studies and nuclear physics is unlikely, some research from our discipline should be of interest to those in the communication or education fields.

To explore this we treated our own location as an example, and asked ourselves questions about the impact of our place in the organisational structure, particularly whether the LIS discipline fitted well with those with which we share a faculty and a school. In the case of the Information Studies programmes at Victoria University of Wellington, our location in a business school is not common, according to our analysis. The other schools within VBS are:

• School of Accounting and Commercial Law

• School of Economics and Finance

• School of Government

• School of Management

• School of Marketing and International Business

Within these other schools, there are elements and individuals with which we could and do have research interests in common (e.g. management of information institutions, public management, digital government etc.) but overall there are weak disciplinary ties between these fields and information studies.

Within the School of Information Management, our partnering with information systems (IS) appears more valid, focused as it is on the study of the use of IT in organisations including how people as individuals interpret information and use technologies (Avgerou, 2000). Avgerou’s explanation of the IS field is remarkably similar to that of Larsen’s (2008) definition of the iField as ‘the relationship between information, technology, and people’ and so we can assume that there are synergies between the LIS and the IS disciplines. The Scientific Journal Rankings from SCImago include IS journals in the category for Library and Information Sciences, for example. In our case, this has led to LIS staff teaching some IS classes. Interestingly, however, contributions do not occur in the other direction, that is none of our IS colleagues have taught on any information studies courses to date, even courses for which they have relevant expertise. This can only serve to limit their understanding of our discipline. In our case, therefore, we can only report a limited amount of teaching across the disciplines and it all occurs in one direction, but what this had led to is better understanding of the Information Systems discipline amongst the LIS staff, and some ‘borrowing’ of methods and theories from it.

We then needed to ask why there had been only a limited amount of interaction between the LIS and IS disciplines in our school. If we could point to some answers to that question, it could throw light on why the LIS discipline generally is failing to make a significant impact outside its own boundaries. Avgerou’s (2000) discussion of the IS field echoes many of the points made by those considering LIS as a discipline. She suggests that ‘the field of IS is not well understood by academics and professionals in other fields’ (p. 567), for example, and notes concerns about its scientific merit, theoretical inter-disciplinarity, the variety of research topics and approaches and methodological pluralism. These are all themes familiar to LIS scholars and, like some in our field cited in the literature review earlier, she argues that the complex nature of the phenomena studied in the discipline, diversity and pluralism are a strength and vital to explore the multi-faceted nature of the use of information technology by and in organisations. She also rejects the need for an overarching or unified theory for the IS discipline (as have many for LIS), maintaining that it is more productive to explore the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of alternative paradigms, without attempting to consolidate them into a more rigorous theoretical foundation for the field. Interestingly, Avgerou also discusses the institutional context of IS noting that in North America, the dominant institutional location in business schools while in Europe the placement is far more diverse but her comments are again reminiscent of those considering the situation of the LIS discipline in higher education institutions, noting: ‘the small concentrations of IS specialists, scattered across disciplines, lack autonomy and resources’ (p. 574).

Our own organisational placement with the IS discipline has prompted us to consider similarities and differences between our fields and institutional circumstances. In contrast to Avgerou’s depiction of IS as a discipline lacking confidence and coherence, we perceive a unified set of colleagues, working in different areas of research interest but with a clear sense of themselves as a discipline at institutional level and as an international scholarly community. Avgerou’s paper was published 18 years ago and it is possible that in the intervening years, IS has become more defined and coherent as a discipline. It should also be noted that she is writing from a European perspective where, as she indicates, the field in smaller and weaker. In our experience of working with IS colleagues, we have observed that the field has made a conscious effort to put boundaries around this discipline, certainly in terms of where they publish, citation sources etc., if not the topics they address and the methodological approaches they adopt. The development of the ‘basket of 8’ journals considered the most prestigious in their field is intended to provide consistency and help scholars in IS focus their publishing efforts (Association for Information Systems, 2011). Similarly, a small number of prestigious conference such as ICIS (International Conference on Information Systems) and HICCS (The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences) have become field-configuring events for the IS discipline and could be seen as attempts to define and give coherence to the field. We suggest that no similar developments have taken place in the LIS discipline. Our journal and conference scene is fragmented according to specialisms in our field and while the iCaucus and its conference could be viewed as an attempt to achieve that ‘field configuration’ for schools identifying themselves as iSchools, the papers presented appear to cover a vast range of information science/LIS topics not specific to just iSchools, reinforcing Golub et al.’s (2017) questions about the distinctiveness of these institutions compared with other LIS schools.

It seems to us that IS has been far more successful than LIS at drawing boundaries around its field even though both are relatively ‘new’ disciplines within academia. Albright (2010) suggests that the key difficulty for LIS lies primarily in the complexity of defining the nature of information but also contends that the reliance on theories and methods from related disciplines restricts our ability to make a distinctive contribution. As noted above, Avgerou (2000) contends that the inter-disciplinarity and methodological plurality of IS is a strength and writers in LIS have similarly cautioned against restricting research approaches in our field. In comparison with our IS colleagues, we suggest that the lack of clear boundaries in LIS, while adverse in terms of disciplinary identity has made us, as a discipline, more open and outward looking both in terms of topic areas and in terms of the range of research methods we use. It has also enabled us to connect with other disciplines beyond our field. However, this can have its downsides if other disciplines claim or adopt methods or approaches developed in LIS, for example bibliometrics, (McKechnie & Pettigrew, 2002). This trend seems to be intensifying; Cronin and Meho (2008) study found that the intellectual trade from information studies to other fields had increased significantly over time.

Becher and Trowler (2001) study of academic tribes suggests that the concept of a discipline is not straightforward and does not necessarily coincide with university organisational units. They conclude their study with a taxonomy of four dimensions that characterise disciplines:

• Hard/soft

• Pure/applied

• Convergent/divergent where convergent disciplines are closely knit, have mutual interests, and share an intellectual style while divergent disciplines tolerate a higher degree of intellectual deviance, which may even result in disruptive conflicts between individuals or groups.

• Urban/rural where urban research is characterised by narrow topics, quick/short range solutions, teamwork and rapid publication, while rural research is slower, takes on broader topics, and tends to be an individual enterprise.

We suggest that the biggest differences between LIS and IS are in the last two dimensions: LIS is divergent, covering a wider range of topics and approaches, and rural, while IS is more convergent and urban. LIS focuses on the study of the phenomenon of information as a whole. Its inquiries address the cycle of information creation and use, investigating the origin and properties of information, its description and organisation, storage, retrieval, interpretation and re-interpretation, and use and reuse. IS is more narrowly focused on the ‘system’ aspect of the phenomenon of information. It is mainly concerned with how information/computer systems facilitate the provision of information and how this enables individuals, organisations and businesses to achieve their goals. Its inquiries tend to focus on infrastructures and processes (including technical, organisational factors) and IT-enabled processes, and the ‘service’ aspect. Because of these differences in the scope of the two disciplines with LIS emphasising broader inquiries, we suggest that this naturally leads scholars in our field to consult more broadly and borrow from other disciplines and domains (divergent and rural). We feel that some of these differences in the nature of our disciplines has made it difficult to involve our IS colleagues in joint research although this has begun to change as a result of our involvement in and contributions to IS courses.

One important difference between the two disciplines that we have observed is that LIS is less theory driven compared to IS. In many ways this is similar to the difference between sociology and anthropology observed by Yates (1985) who suggested that the former is ‘obsessed’ with methodology and scientific status while the latter is far more relaxed in this regard. According to Lyytinen and King (2004, p. 221), IS scholars, ‘haunted by feelings of inadequacy’, have become overly concerned with establishing a strong theoretical core to the extent that ‘theory is king’ (Lee, 2014). Lyytinen and King reject the notion that academic legitimacy is contingent on the presence of a core theory and suggest that efforts to establish one are misdirecting efforts that would be better spent in other pursuits, a point echoed by Field (2001, p. 1) who concludes that ‘it is time for IS academics to stop asking themselves questions about the practicality of their discipline, about whether or not they have a coherent paradigm, and indeed whether or not they are a science at all, and just get on with their work’. This ‘theory fetish’ (Avison & Malaurent, 2014) can pose a barrier to closer integration between LIS and IS as the latter may consider we have nothing substantial to contribute in this regard, although as IS has become increasingly divergent over the last 10 years, with the adoption of a wider range of research methods and topics, we are starting to see more joint research and recognition that we have a valued contribution to make. The role of theory in LIS has been a common theme running through the scholarly literature in our field although perhaps not to the same extent as that in IS. The limited engagement with theory in LIS research has been noted by, among others, Vakkari (2008) and Day (2011). McKechnie and Pettigrew's (2002) analysis of the use of theory in papers in six LIS journals found that 34.2% included mention of theory in either title, abstract or text with some specialisms, e.g. those related to the humanities such as information policy, recording a higher incidence of theory use. Some years later, Kim and Jeong (2006) found that 41.4% of the articles they analysed in a sample of Korean and international journals were theoretical. While this represented an increase, they noted a decline in the use of theory in the international journals, which they highlighted as ‘alarming’ (p. 559), particularly considering Connaway and Powell (2010) comments about the use and development of theory being one of the primary indicators of a mature discipline.

Another difference between the LIS and IS disciplines of note is the extent of dialogue and connections with our respective practitioner communities. This may well have an impact on the extent of theory use and development discussed earlier. Bob McKee, then Head of Solihull Public Libraries in the United Kingdom, noted, for example:

I do not want a piece of research that is academically rigorous, analytically comprehensive, methodologically impeccable, unreadable, 200 pages too long and two years too late. What I want is an OK investigation which is analytically and methodologically maybe 80% satisfactory, brief, of practical utility and timely. (McKee, 1991, p. 24)

As Genoni, Haddow, and Ritchie (2004) indicate, the communication gap between LIS academics and practitioners has been explored many times in our literature and yet, in our experience, we collaborate more with our LIS practitioner stakeholders for both teaching and research purposes than our IS colleagues. Many LIS academics are, to an extent, dependent on the institutional contexts of libraries and other information organisations, despite iSchool attempts to move away from agency-centric research and this necessitates stronger ties with the information profession and practice. In contrast, we have observed that in relation to research in particular, our IS colleagues’ conversations tend to be with other IS academics. While Nolin and Åström (2010) consider the LIS discipline’s connection with professionals outside academia a strength, Cannon (2017) suggests it can hinder the development of epistemological knowledge and thus the academic maturity of our field. Similarly, Grover and Glazier (1986) suggest that LIS research has been so focused on addressing situational, practical problems that it has neglected the theoretical base of the field. This may lead to a view of the LIS discipline within the school and university as concerned primarily with practical, consultancy-type research rather than that capable of making a theoretical contribution.

Conclusion

We began this study because we were curious about our own placement in the organisational structure of Victoria University of Wellington, and wondered whether LIS teaching and research in countries similar to New Zealand were finding a ‘home’ with any other academic discipline. We asked two broad questions: where were LIS schools located in the structures of academic institutions, and was there evidence of co-teaching with other disciplines?

The results of this study suggest that LIS programmes and academics remain scattered across a diversity of university schools and faculties, much as previously identified by Borup Larsen (2005) and Wilson et al. (2012). While the decline in numbers of separate LIS schools (either as a stand-alone faculty or a totally separate institution) seems to have halted (22% in our analysis compared to 16% in Borup Larsen’s data) perhaps as a result of the iSchool movement, it is not clear how successful the iSchools have been in clarifying and expounding the nature of our discipline. It was, after all, one of the stated purpose of the iSchools that they would strengthen and consolidate the LIS discipline by emphasising a focus on ‘the growing information, technology and knowledge economy’ (iSchools, n.d.). The location of LIS schools in a wide variety of different types of faculties and the pairing of programmes with assorted other academic subjects suggest that senior university managers remain unclear about where LIS academics may best be placed to take advantage of and contribute to interdisciplinary collaboration, or among those decision-makers who believe they have a clear idea of where to place LIS that there is no consistency in the chosen location. This in itself may reflect a lack of clarity about the nature of the discipline, though equally it could simply point to a failure to communicate it to those who make the big decisions about academic institutional structures. When considering the impact of LIS school placement, and whether this has sparked interdisciplinary co-teaching, our initial analysis of programme content indicates that few LIS programmes incorporate substantial content from their partner programmes or schools, although there may be more collaboration with regard to research.

The issue of identity as a discipline is a vexed one for LIS and remains difficult to address. Our lack of clear boundaries and identity has led to our placement in university organisational arrangements that do not always provide the most positive synergies, and this distribution further mitigates against the development of a clear, coherent disciplinary identity. We suggest that the academic LIS teaching and research community still has a job to do to delineate and explain our discipline because our current weak identity produces partnerships or marriages of convenience that do not always lead to productive teaching or research relationships.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Small Faculty Grant from Victoria Business School, Victoria University of Wellington.

Notes on contributors

Anne Goulding

Anne Goulding is Professor of Library and Information Management in the School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington.  She received her PhD in Information Studies from Sheffield University in the UK and was an academic at Loughborough University’s Department of Information Science before moving to New Zealand in 2013.  Her research interests lie primarily in the management of library services, particularly public libraries.  She is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.

Brenda Chawner

Brenda Chawner is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington. Brenda’s research interests include open access publishing, copyright and licensing of digital material, professional development, and flexible learning in information studies education. She is also interested in the use of volunteers in libraries, and in “independent” libraries that are not formally affiliated with a public library system. She is on the editorial boards of LIBRES and the Aslib Journal of Information Management.

Jennifer Campbell-Meier

Jennifer Campbell-Meier is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington. Her current research projects examine professional identity and professional education within library and information science. Jennifer is the Director of the postgraduate Information Studies programs at VUW. Her research interests include professional development, mentoring, and digital collection development.

Philip Calvert

Philip Calvert is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. In the past he worked in public and academic libraries in the United Kingdom, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. In academia he has researched the effectiveness of public and school libraries in New Zealand.

Chern Li Liew

Chern Li Liew is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington.  Chern Li's research interests are centred around the social studies of information, with a focus on users and impact. Her research on digital heritage investigates the potential of participatory culture and participatory governance for enriching documentary heritage and cultural information services.  Chern Li serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Online Information Review, International Journal of Digital Library Systems and The Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation.

Notes

1. Zhang, Yan, and Hassman (2013) also include ‘management’ as part of the iField.