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The Information Studies Curriculum: Mapping the Foundations
Introduction "Information studies" is a broad term which enables us to offer courses in many different areas and, particularly in the UK, allowed departments that were under Pressure in the Thatcher years to compensate for the decline in public funding for libraries by diversifying into new and related areas. The general history of schools and departments in the UK has been reviewed by Wood (1997) and the volume in which that paper appears (Elkin & Wilson, 1997) deals with other aspects of the development of the field and the range of programmes available. Boundaries are necessary, however, no matter how diverse the field may be and this paper sets out to define those boundaries with the intentions of aiding thinking about the curriculum and the relationships among courses. The Foundation Fields "Information studies" may be seen as resulting from the interactions among four fields, described here as foundation fields, which are:
Information content Libraries have been concerned, traditionally, with the management of information content, usually being described as "collection development" or "information resources". The term information content is now used because of the impact of the Internet and the World Wide Web, where "content providers" are much more diverse than the publishers who provided most of the information resources in the days when most information provision was dominated by print on paper. The LIS curriculum continues to cover this area to a greater extent than do cognate fields such as information systems and computer science. However, the sources have diversified greatly and, increasingly, have become electronic in form, rather than physical. Consequently the means for identifying, organizing and providing access to sources have also changed and the curriculum has changed and is changing, to keep pace, thus, students must be aware of the kinds of resources that only appear in electronic form - even such a renowned source such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as the vast array of company and financial sources that now rarely appear in print. Information systems Information systems is a separate field from information studies, and is sometimes part of computer science departments or business schools. Its orientation is towards information in organizational settings and in this context, information systems is used to identify not only the technology, but also the human systems through which information sources and resources may be organized and managed. It must now include, therefore, the communication and information technologies that are now used in the organization of information content, such as WAP phones, database technologies and networks. People This is perhaps the most diverse of these fundamental fields and, as a result of its diversity, the relationship among people and the other fundamental fields are perhaps the most complex of all. It appears self-explanatory, but its range is wide, as it covers both information users and information providers, in the sense of those who manage information systems and services, and it also covers those who manage the information providing organizations and organizations that have information systems and services within them. Organizations Finally, organizations are of three kinds:
The Fields in Interaction The four fields are shown in Figure 1 together with some of the subject areas created by the intersections of the different areas. Over-arching the fields described above are the functions of policy, planning and strategy, which may be viewed at the organizational, national or international level and related to each of the fields defined by the diagram. They may also Setting out these areas as a list gives us the following (note that not all elements are shown in the diagram):
Figure 1 is not a Venn diagram, as it does not show all possible relationships among the four fields. Figure 2 (Ruskey, 1997) is such a diagram, and it can be used to create a more detailed map of the potential areas of interest. Logically, it has fifteen areas (more correctly, sixteen, since the last is represented by the area outside the diagram). These are:
To these we add, again: E Policy, planning and strategy (although we could construct a Venn diagram with five, six or even seven fields to bring areas such as this into consideration).
How we decide to allocate the areas to the four main fields is a matter of choice (and perhaps of the purpose of the classification) since, from the point of view of the logic of the diagram, they can go in any of the fundamental fields. However, the classification derived from the diagram brings some rigour into the process, since we have to think carefully about the assignments and their meanings and orientation. For example, attaching ABCD to People, rather than to Organizations, gives it, to my mind an orientation towards social psychology, rather than to organizational theory or organizational behaviour. It would be perfectly sensible, however, to locate it as a kind of subdivision of Organizations, if that was the orientation intended. The descriptions attached to each sub-field are also a matter of choice - all Figure 2 suggests, for example, is that ABC indicates a relationship involving people, information content, and information systems, and I have chose to label it Information seeking and searching. Someone else, with a different perspective could choose a different label and perhaps the many labels would constitute the total logical content of the sub-field. Applications It is proposed that this map of the areas related to information studies, derived from the Venn diagram, may be used in various ways. The most obvious use is to identify curriculum areas of importance in constructing a degree programme. We could choose to identify all of the sub-fields as areas of interest and construct a broad curriculum, or we could focus on one main field, such as Information systems and select from its intersections with the other fields those that would make up a useful and interesting specialist programme. For example, we might choose to centre on Information systems - this would be equivalent to extracting Figure 3 from Figure 2. The array of topics suggested by the areas of overlap with the other fields might well lead to a richer curriculum than if we centred solely on the core area of information systems. Another application would be to examine the proficiencies of academic staff members (as well as of technical support staff who may be involved in teaching) to determine how they might best be used in the development of courses. Given the ever-changing nature of the field we might also use the model to suggest what re-training or personal development might best suit academic staff members as the field changes. For example, if the core competency of a staff member is in the area covered by BC (systems for information content), it would be reasonable to suggest that he or she might most effectively develop additional competencies in the "boundary" areas: that is, ABC, BCD and ABCD (which we might label, Information seeking, Organizational information systems, and Information seeking in relation to such systems).
Figure 3 We can also examine existing curricula through the map, to discover how courses are distributed over the "fundamental fields" and to decide whether other fundamental areas are needed for a full description of the field or of a specific curriculum. For example, the courses shown in Table I were taken from part of a curriculum on the design and evaluation of library systems and services. Each course has been allocated a letter (A, B, C or D) to signify which of the fundamental fields (or their intersections) appears to relate most closely. The table has then been sorted by those letters to group the courses according to the fields:
The allocation, of course, is somewhat subjective, since it relies on titles alone to assess a course, and others might allocate them differently. However, the resulting distribution suggests that all four fields are well represented in this area and that there is a strong orientation towards information systems. When we look at another area, that of information organization and analysis, we find (when we remove courses that also appear in Table I) the courses in Table II:
Not surprisingly, given the broad theme, Information Content figures largely in this list, with a strong orientation towards Information Systems. Looking at Tables I and II (which represent only part of its courses), we can see that this School is a strong one, with a wide range of courses that can be linked to all four of the fundamental fields. Looking at a School outside of North America, the topics in a Latin American programme are shown in Table III.
Two things are apparent: the presence of what we can call background studies or management and research tools - quantitative methods and statistics, and the greater orientation towards the traditional subjects of librarianship. That greater orientation towards librarianship is also shown in the reduced role that technological issues play in the curriculum. Clearly, this School is very different in the range of possibilities it can offer than the North American School. Thus, one may use the map as a basis for a comparative study of LIS education, using the World List of Departments and Schools of Information Studies, Information Management, Information Systems, etc. [1] to locate curricula. An LIS Department could also use the model to determine its target areas for expansion and the staff skills and competencies it would need to expand. The skills might be obtained either by recruitment, by re-training, or by strategic collaboration with other departments in the institution. For example, if an LIS Department is seen as occupying mainly the Information Content sector of the map, collaboration with a Sociology or Psychology department might bring in skills related to People, with a Computer Science department, skills related to Information Systems, and with a Management department, skills related to Organizations. Numerous examples exist of departments in the UK that have done just this in their undergraduate programmes in the field. A further application concerns the relationship between teaching and the search for research areas, particularly when new members of academic staff with qualifications in one or other of the core fields are seeking to establish themselves. Someone whose expertise, developed through their Ph.D., is in the field of information systems and who moves into an information studies department has the possibility of continuing to work on his or her core area, but also may have the opportunity, perhaps in team-based research, of moving into the related areas of AC, BC or CD - or any subdivision of these. The choice may be determined by the existing research strengths of the Department as well as by curriculum requirements. Finally, although this may not complete the possible applications, we can use the model to create a 'benchmark' of what we claim to be the field of information studies. As everyone in the LIS field in the United Kingdom is aware, the Quality Assurance Agency (2000) has produced a benchmark statement for the field. Of course, this includes more than simply a statement of appropriate curriculum areas: it deals, in addition, with general transferable skills, teaching processes, and assessment. The "core elements" of the field (called, inappropriately in my opinion, "the discipline") are presented as: "1.1 The processes and techniques whereby information is created, captured, analysed, evaluated, moderated and managed in a variety of media and formats in the service of defined user populations 1.2 The application of techniques for planning, implementing, evaluating, analysing and developing library, archive and information products, services and systems within the context of organisational culture, objectives and client base, professional statutory and ethical frameworks, and national and international legislation and regulations 1.3 The broad concepts and theories of information systems and information and communication technologies insofar as they apply to the principles and practices of information management 1.4 The dynamics of information flow in society, in and between nations, governments, organisations and individuals" (QAA, 2000: 1) Any attempt by a committee to produce a statement of this kind, without a fundamental analysis of what the field is about, would result in something similar, but it is evident that this statement has not been preceded by any fundamental analysis of the changing nature of "information studies". For example, 1.3 (which seems to this author to be almost meaningless) omits any mention of the principles and practice of library management - are we to assume, as a result, that the 'broad concepts and theories of information systems and information and communication technologies' apply only to information management? Or that library management and information management are identical - they clearly are not, on any established definition of either field. Nor do we find any mention of fundamental aspects of human information behaviour, in organizations or in society at large. One can reasonably argue that a prior model of the field (any model - it need not be that proposed here) could have provided a more secure base for identifying what the field is about than that proposed by the QAA. To conclude: models help us to think about problems - they are thinking tools, not straight-jackets. Many models of systems are feasible, none is complete; but without such tools for thinking we are reduced to describing what is, at this moment, and tied to our customary ways of doing things while the world around us changes. Models can help us to cope with change, to determine how new concepts, new political motives, new technologies may impact upon what we do and how we teach. Perhaps they may even prepare us to consider logical associations that, as yet, do not exist, but that may influence the development of the field in years to come. Notes World List of Departments and Schools of Information Studies, Information Management, Information Systems, etc. Available http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/publications/worldlist/wlist1.html This paper is based on an earlier report presented at the 4th British-Nordic Conference on Library and Information Studies, Dublin, March 21-23 2001. References
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