Department of Library and Information Scienc1

DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE LIL 101 (LIBRARIES, INFORMATION AND SOCIETY) ASSIGNMENT BY

ID NUMBER: 12/11/0403/001

INTRODUCTION Today's age is defined by the intersection of information, technology, and human creativity. In this context, library and information science is dedicated to understanding the nature of information, the interaction between information and communication technologies, the relationship between information and knowledge, the cognitive and affective aspects of knowledge acquisition, and the interface between people and information. It offers new knowledge, technological benefits, and professional expertise for every dimension of human affairs.

LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, RELATIONSHIP AND EVOLUTION Library and information professionals take on many challenges in serving the needs of their constituencies (different strata of society) which include children and teachers, members of academic communities, employees of profit and non-profit organizations, and the public at large. It also includes constituencies that range from information poor to information rich. They work in the contexts of issues such as information and communication technology, public

and private information policy, managerial policy, and regional, national, and international economics. The common ground between library and information, 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 access to the society. 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."

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. Concern for people becoming informed is not unique to Library and Information science, and thus is insufficient to differentiate LIS from other fields. LIS are a part of a larger enterprise." (Konrad, 2007). The unique concern of LIS is recognized as: Statement of the core concern of LIS: Humans becoming informed (constructing meaning) via intermediation between inquirers and instrumented records. No other field has this as its concern. " (Konrad, 2007) Note that the promiscuous term information does not appear in the above statement circumscribing the field's central concerns. Furner [2004] has shown that discourse in the field is improved where specific terms are utilized in place of the i-word for specific senses of that term (Konrad, 2007). Michael Buckland wrote also wrote that Educational programs in library, information and documentation are concerned with what people know, are not limited to technology, and require wide-ranging expertise. They differ

fundamentally and importantly from computer science programs and from the information systems programs found in business schools.

THE SOCIAL ROLE OF LIBRARIES IN THE SOCIETY A first perspective on how libraries can still be relevant institutions in the digital age has been variously elaborated, Schulz emphasized that a library should be seen as a place, as a space and as a relation. Developing the library as relation means to develop and present information in cooperation with other cultural institution, local civil society and residents. The library as a place relates to the library as a hub in a city's fabric, while the library as a space is constituted by the social aspect (meeting others, community center, concerts, platform for local debates, etc.) and the bodily aspect (comfy chair, great architecture, the library cafe, etc.). This concept puts the user (rather than books) at the center of the library and offers a bodily and social experience that virtual interaction cannot offer, at least not in the same way.

In the last decades, many advanced libraries have found new ways of fulfilling its public task to make information available publicly, by improving skills (e.g. computer courses for elderly people), by arousing people's curiosity by presenting information on an innovative way and by presenting information thematically whilst using multiple media formats. As an example, Schulz' library developed the iFloor, by which library content can be browsed by walking on a sensor-equiped screen carpet. In Schulz' experience this has drastically increased interaction between library visitors. The fact that libraries make active use of new technologies to present information was also a central aspect in the presentation of Erik Boekesteijn,

who works at the DOK library in Delft, the Netherlands. As an example he presented a multi-touch table that enables library members to access the city archive with their library card. The table recognizes the library card and presents archive material (old pictures, maps, etc.) from the member's neighborhood. Files can then be shared, for example by mail. Note that the presented information was already available on the city archive's website. The formal accessibility was already there, the role of the library was to present existing information in a tempting way.

The new role of libraries in the digital age was also addressed by Nathalie Vallet, who studies libraries in Belgium and the Netherlands. She found that the development of new libraries are a tested way for local governments to strengthen their city's profile, often by landmark architecture. She added that such prestige library projects in the city center also reinforce attention for less spectacular libraries that play an important social role on the neighborhood community level. CONCLUSION It can be concluded that library which has an intricate relationship with information plays a vital role in the society. In this is evident in the fact that the library as a place relates to the library as a hub in a city's fabric, while the library as a space is constituted by the social aspect (meeting others, community center, concerts, platform for local debates, etc.) and the bodily aspect (comfy chair, great architecture, the library cafe, etc.). This concept puts the user (rather than books) at the center of the library and offers a bodily and social experience that virtual interaction cannot offer, at least not in the same way.

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