, an early
library Libraries have existed for many centuries but library science is a more recent phenomenon, as early libraries were managed primarily by academics.
17th and 18th century , author of
Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627), later translated into English in 1661 The earliest text on "library operations",
Advice on Establishing a Library was published in 1627 by French librarian and scholar
Gabriel Naudé. Naudé wrote on many subjects including politics, religion, history, and the supernatural. He put into practice all the ideas put forth in
Advice when given the opportunity to build and maintain the library of
Cardinal Jules Mazarin. During the
'golden age of libraries' in the 17th century, publishers and sellers seeking to take advantage of the burgeoning book trade developed descriptive catalogs of their wares for distribution – a practice was adopted and further extrapolated by many libraries of the time to cover areas like philosophy, sciences, linguistics, and medicine In 1726
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote
Idea of Arranging a Narrower Library. 19th century is used as a means of organising literature by topic.
Martin Schrettinger wrote the second textbook (the first in Germany) on the subject from 1808 to 1829. Some of the main tools used by LIS to provide access to the resources originated in 19th century to make information accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge. The origin for some of these tools were even earlier.
Thomas Jefferson, whose library at
Monticello consisted of thousands of books, devised a classification system inspired by the
Baconian method, which grouped books more or less by subject rather than alphabetically, as it was previously done. The Jefferson collection provided the basis of what became the
Library of Congress after the first collection was destroyed in the 1814
Burning of Washington. The first American school of librarianship opened in New York under the leadership of
Melvil Dewey, noted for his
1876 decimal classification, on January 5, 1887, as the
Columbia College School of Library Economy. The term
library economy was common in the U.S. until 1942, with the term,
library science, predominant through much of the 20th century.
20th century In the English-speaking world the term "library science" seems to have been used for the first time in India in the 1916 book
Punjab Library Primer, written by Asa Don Dickinson and published by the
University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. This university was the first in Asia to begin teaching "library science". The
Punjab Library Primer was the first textbook on library science published in English anywhere in the world. The first textbook in the United States was the
Manual of Library Economy by
James Duff Brown, published in 1903. Later, the term was used in the title of
S. R. Ranganathan's
The Five Laws of Library Science, published in 1931, which contains Ranganathan's
titular theory. Ranganathan is also credited with the development of the first major analytical-synthetic classification system, the
colon classification. In the United States, Lee Pierce Butler published his 1933 book
An Introduction to Library Science (University of Chicago Press), where he advocated for research using
quantitative methods and ideas in the
social sciences with the aim of using librarianship to address society's information needs. He was one of the first faculty at the
University of Chicago Graduate Library School, which changed the structure and focus of education for librarianship in the twentieth century. This research agenda went against the more procedure-based approach of the "library economy", which was mostly confined to practical problems in the administration of libraries. In 1923,
Charles C. Williamson, who was appointed by the Carnegie Corporation, published an assessment of library science education entitled "The Williamson Report", which designated that universities should provide library science training. This report had a significant impact on library science training and education. Library research and practical work, in the area of information science, have remained largely distinct both in training and in research interests.
William Stetson Merrill's
A Code for Classifiers, released in several editions from 1914 to 1939, is an example of a more pragmatic approach, where arguments stemming from in-depth knowledge about each field of study are employed to recommend a system of classification. While Ranganathan's approach was philosophical, it was also tied more to the day-to-day business of running a library. A reworking of Ranganathan's laws was published in 1995 which removes the constant references to books.
Michael Gorman's
Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century features the eight principles necessary by library professionals and incorporates knowledge and information in all their forms, allowing for digital information to be considered.
From library science to LIS By the late 1960s, mainly due to the meteoric rise of human computing power and the new academic disciplines formed therefrom, academic institutions began to add the term "information science" to their names. The first school to do this was at the
University of Pittsburgh in 1964. More schools followed during the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s almost all library schools in the US had added information science to their names. Although there are exceptions, similar developments have taken place in other parts of the world. In
India, the Department of Library Science,
University of Madras (southern state of
Tamil Nadu, India) became the Department of Library and Information Science in 1976. In
Denmark, for example, the "Royal School of Librarianship" changed its English name to
The Royal School of Library and Information Science in 1997.
21st century The
digital age has transformed how information is accessed and
retrieved. "The library is now a part of a complex and dynamic educational, recreational, and informational infrastructure." the concept of
data literacy has emerged within library and information science as a complement to information literacy to refer to the ability to find, interpret, evaluate, manage, and ethically use data to support research, learning, and informed decision-making. In the early 2000s, dLIST, Digital Library for Information Sciences and Technology was established. It was the first
open access archive for the multidisciplinary 'library and information sciences' building a global scholarly communication consortium and the LIS Commons in order to increase the visibility of research literature, bridge the divide between practice, teaching, and research communities, and improve visibility, uncitedness, and integrate scholarly work in the critical information infrastructures of archives, libraries, and museums.
Social justice, an important ethical value in librarianship and in the 21st century has become an important research area, if not subdiscipline of LIS. ==Journals==