Post written by David Bawden and Lyn Robinson
And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’sthoughts for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clearaway, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills. [Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924)]
Almost ten years ago, we wrote an article on the LIS discipline for the Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (Bawden and Robinson, 2016). We summarised the situation as we saw it then as: Library and information science (LIS) is the discipline which studies the information communication chain: all aspects of the creation, organization, management, communication and use of recorded information. It supports the professional activities of the collection disciplines, including information management, librarianship, archiving and records management. Its core areas include information behavior, information organization and metadata, information seeking, information retrieval, information architecture, information society, information law and ethics, information management and policy, bibliometrics and library services. Library and information science is regarded as a meta-discipline, with a wide variety of applicable theories, philosophical bases and research methods. The discipline is undergoing changes as it adapts to new forms of documents and collections, and to new information environments.
In the second edition of our textbook Introduction to Information Science (Bawden and Robinson (2022), we looked at the ‘I’ end of LIS, taking as a definition: Information science is a field of study, with recorded information and documentation as its concern, focusing on the components of the information communication chain, studied through the perspective of domain analysis. [It] is a vocational discipline, underlying a number of professional activities, including: data, information, and knowledge management; librarianship; metadata and taxonomy management; records management and archiving; and documentation in museums, galleries and heritage institutions.
Since these comments were written, there have been continuing, and rapidly increasing, changes to the way the discipline is taught and practised. There is a particular concern over the nature and future of the LIS discipline, especially in light of the problems of smaller disciplines in the Anglosphere universities, with LIS commonly being enfolded into wider subject groupings, “broader informational constructs” as Lorcan Dempsey (2025, p.89) terms them; most commonly into computing / data science / HCI or media / journalism / communication, sometimes into groupings aligned with business, education, or cultural studies. Technological changes, especially the dramatic rise of generative AI, also cast doubt on the nature and purpose of the discipline going forward. Various commentators have taken up these points; we mention only a few of the more interesting contributions here.
Pertti Vakkari (2024), using Whitley’s theories of disciplines, considers LIS as a ‘fragmenting discipline’, due to its being composed of distinct and somewhat self-contained sub-fields, such as information retrieval, information seeking, information literacy, informetrics, library and information services, and scientific communication. This is exacerbated by the strong contributions of other disciplines to certain subfields, notably computer science for information retrieval, and management for library and information services. These points are echoed in the concern for the place of ‘traditional’ LIS within American iSchools expressed in the 2023 LIS Forward position paper and the 2025 Responses.
Vivien Petras (2024) reconsiders the foundations of the information science discipline (including libraries and library science as specialised area within it, and hence congruent with LIS) as centred on ‘manifested information’: Information science is concerned with how information is manifested across space and time. Information is manifested to facilitate and support the representation, access, documentation and preservation of ideas, activities, or practices, and to enable different types of interactions between people and other agents, for example, communication and exchange. Even if humans are not the initial creators or consumers of manifested information, information science considers all phenomena and practices around manifested information across space and time within its purview. Petras, perhaps wisely, considers it unhelpful to be overly concerned about whether we are dealing with a discipline, metadiscipline or field of study, and argues that it is a discipline in its own right, rather than any form of interdiscipline.
LIS has often been seen as a discipline in search of a philosophical foundation. Some years ago, we suggested that this might be found in Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Information (Bawden and Robinson, 2018). Recently, Dominic Dixon (2025), suggesting that LIS lacks a clearly articulated epistemological foundation, has recommended that a variant of social epistemology (SE), which combines traditional SE’s prescriptive standards for knowledge with a sensitivity to the knowledge practices in institutions such as libraries, may serve as such a foundation.
Lorcan Dempsey (2025, p. 111-120) gives a detailed, perceptive and well-referenced analysis of the informational disciplines, including LIS, with an unusually clear understanding both of the nuances of the historical development of the subjects and of the latest trends and issues. Commendably, he presents no simplistic answers, but addresses issues ranging from the place of the disciplines in the academy to the relations between theory, research and practice.
One quite dramatic recent development is the widespread adoption of generative AI, applied in what are generally regarded as the core areas of LIS, including but not limited to information retrieval, literature searching and analysis, abstracting and summarising, evaluation of information, metadata creation, and authoring and reviewing of scholarly materials. Quite what the full implications will be remains to be seen. as an example of recent analyses, Amanda Hovious and Andrew Smith (2025) focus on the scholarly communication part of the ‘LIS ecosystem’, Carlo Galli and colleagues (2025) discuss the impact on literature searching and reviewing, while Tim Gorichanaz (2025) considers how information practices answering information needs may be supported by generative AI.
At the heart of the discipline, of course, is information, albeit instantiated or manifested in documents. Changing understandings of information itself must necessarily have an influence on how the discipline is perceived and situated; two recent wide-ranging reviews in the journal Information by Bawden and Robinson (2020) and by Tredennick (2025) illustrate new perspectives. Dempsey (2025, pp 95-103) gives an insightful LIS-focused historical perspective.
The trend for subsuming LIS into broader academic areas, informationally-focused to varying degrees, raises the question is to whether a new a broader discipline might replace LIS; one based on principles rather than ad hoc and institutionally dependent academic restructuring. There have been two recent convincing suggestions for new disciplines subsuming LIS.
Niels Winfield Lund in his book Introduction to Documentation Studies suggests a new discipline of Documentation, Information and Communication Studies, which he defines as “the study of the documentative, informative and communicative processes taking place in human interaction through systematic complementary and comparative study of documentation forms, document management and document design” (Lund, 2024, p.145). This is arguably a return to the documentation movement roots of information science, and more toward the I than the L of LIS, albeit set in a wider context than that of the traditional library/information communication setting. The book was awarded the Best Information Science Book Award for 2025 by the Association for Information Science and Technology, perhaps an indication of an appetite within the LIS community for a new disciplinary approach.
Luciano Floridi (2025), in an editorial letter in the journal Philosophy and Technology, has suggested a new discipline of ‘content studies’, echoing Petras in responding to the idea that much content in the future will be produced by generative AI. Content here is understood as meaningful and well-formed data conveyed through media systems (arguably very close to the LIS conception of information instantiated in documents), spanning diverse formats, including text, visuals, audio, video, games and interactive experiences. It is now largely conveyed through digital media but analogue media are included in this idea of content. Crucially, it includes content which is algorithmically created, adapted, and mediated. Content Studies includes the study of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and ethical dimensions of content creation and dissemination, with five key phases: design, creation, distribution, reception, and transformation (arguably analogous to the ‘information communication chain’ of LIS. Floridi mentions LIS as one of the current disciplines which might contribute to content studies, although most of his examples focus on education, journalism, and IT system development. This idea for a new discipline certainly reflects the current focus on generative AI as provoking change in all aspects of the communication of information, and an increasing interest in the common interests of LIS and journalism. It remains at an early, and rather general, conceptual stage.
Or perhaps a new discipline is not needed. Perhaps the insights and concepts of LIS are better expressed by being embedded within a wider context, as Siobhan Stevenson (2025) expresses in the iSchool context: “I do feel that LIS as a history, intellectual tradition, and democratizing enterprise (and concomitant values) is vitally important today, I just wonder if it would be more valuable as the thread of continuity through all iSchool concentrations rather than its own thing…in this way the valuable traditions of LIS would remain foundational but also be reanimated through the range of other studies”. Lorcan Dempsey makes the similar suggestion that “it may be appropriate to think of LIS and of Information Science as ongoing social communities, supported by particular educational affiliations, journals, conferences, and associations rather than as self-standing disciplines” (Dempsey, 2025, p.92).
In whatever ways LIS may develop, whether in the form of a new discipline, absorption into broader informational structures, or a social community, we suggest that the continuing challenge will be to maintain the relevance of the core intellectual components of the LIS discipline, which Dempsey (2025) appositely calls ‘Classical Information Science’, with a continuing centrality of the idea of information conveyed through documents, bringing knowledge out of the dark of time.
References
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2016) Library and Information Science. In Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, K.B. Jensen, R.T. Craig, J.D. Pooley and E.W. Rothenbuhler (eds.), Wiley, vol.1 pp. 1068-1073. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect113.
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2018) Curating the infosphere: Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Information as the foundation for Library and Information Science. Journal of Documentation, 74(1), 2-17. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2017-0096.
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2020) Still minding the gap? Reflecting on transitions between concepts of information in varied domains. Information, 11(2), 71. https://doi.org/10.3390/info11020071.
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2022) Introduction to information science (2nd edn.), London: Facet. ISBN:9781783304950.
Dempsey, L. (2025) Library studies, the informational disciplines, and the iSchool: some remarks prompted by LIS Forward. In LIS Forward Responses, pp. 87-139.
Dixon, D. (2025) Social epistemology as an epistemological foundation for library and information science. Social Epistemology, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2025.2574302.
Dunsany, Lord (1924) The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Edition published by Tom Stacey Reprints, London, 1972, p. 131.
Floridi, L. (2025) Content studies: a new academic discipline for analysing, evaluating, and designing content in a digital and AI‑driven age. Philosophy and Technology, 38(2), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-025-00877-6.
Galli, C. Moretti, C. and Calciolari, E. (2025) Intelligent summaries: will artificial intelligence mark the finale for biomedical literature reviews. Learned Publishing, 38(1), paper e1648. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1648.
Gorichanaz, T. (2025) Information needs and practices supported by ChatGPT, Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 62(1), 253-262. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1253.
Hovious, A.S. and Smith, A.J.M. (2025) The impact of generative AI on the LIS ecosystem: threats and opportunities, Library Trends, 73(4), 538-552. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2025.a968527.
LIS Forward (2023) Ensuring a vibrant future for LIS in iSchools. The Friday Harbour Papers Vol.1. University of Washington Information School. https://doi.org/10.6069/TG4M-8B21.
LIS Forward Responses (2025) Responses to the LIS Forward position paper: ensuring a vibrant future for LIS in iSchools. The Friday Harbour Papers Vol.2. University of Washington Information School. https://doi.org/10.6069/F6CQ-H317.
Lund, N.W. (2024) Introduction to Documentation Studies. London: Facet. ISBN:9781783301898
Petras, V. (2024) The identity of information science. Journal of Documentation, 80(3), 579-596. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2023-0074
Stevenson, S. (2025) Unpacking this thing called “library and information science”. In LIS Forward Responses, pp. 19-21.
Tredennick, L. (2025) Theory and metatheory in the nature of information: review and thematic analysis. Information, 16(9), 791. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16090791.
Vakkari, P. (2024) What characterizes LIS as a fragmenting discipline? Journal of Documentation, 80(7), 60-77. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-10-2023-0207.
The Occasional Informationist 