LIS Education in the Digital Age for an African Agenda

To provide an exposé of digital-age library and information science (LIS) education for an African agenda, this paper adopts an emergent qualitative research design by drawing on the literature on LIS education in Africa. It also draws on data gleaned from a survey of heads of schools of LIS in South Africa, and from content analyses of LIS school websites in South Africa and selected parts of the continent. The paper locates its narrative within Abbott’s chaos of disciplines theory and concludes that the LIS discipline’s “interstitial nature,” its “fractal distinctions in time,” and the resulting chaos of disciplines should not be seen as a crisis for LIS education in Africa and globally, but as an opportunity for a paradigm shift to broaden the LIS disciplinary domain and to stake an intellectual claim on this extended domain—and so contribute to the growth and development of LIS services in Africa within the context of an African development agenda

How International is Your LIS/IS Program in the Global Higher Education Era?

Internationalization is a critical issue in LIS/IS education and the LIS/IS profession. This panel assembles educators from various continents to discover their experiences and to address the following issues: International students should comprise what percentage of a student body in order to adequately represent the spectrum of disciplines that are critical to contemporary LIS/IS schools? International faculty members should comprise what percentage of a faculty in order to adequately represent the spectrum of disciplines that are critical to contemporary LIS/IS schools? How international must a curriculum be in order to adequately prepare graduates for the challenges of the rapidly changing information environment of the future? How do our panelists build beneficial partnerships with international professional stakeholders? How do our panelists ensure the quality of LIS education from an international perspective

Future LIS education and evolving global competency requirements for the digital information environment: an epistemological overview

In the context of an evolving digitally-oriented library and/or information science (LIS) discipline and framed by Andrew Abbott’s (2001) Chaos of Disciplines theory, this paper presents an epistemological overview of evolving competency requirements for a global digital information environment and the implications of this for future LIS education. In doing so it draws from i) an international case study of ongoing research by the IFLA BSLISE (Building Strong LIS Education) Working Group into the development of an international framework for the assessment of quality standards in LIS education, and ii) a national (South African) case study involving the compilation of a LIS competency index in a highly digitally-oriented information environment. The Chaos of Disciplines theory was originally conceptualized to demonstrate the evolution of disciplines in the social sciences. Its core principals of The Interstitial Character of a Discipline and Fractal Distinctions in Time are employed as a heuristic tool to connect the empirical evidence from these two purposively selected case studies to the inherent nature of the LIS discipline and the implications of this for i) competency requirements for professional practice in a highly digitized global information environment, and ii) future LIS education responding to these competency exigencies

Knowledge and skills requirements of National University of Lesotho librarians in meeting information needs of humanities undergraduate students in the digital age

This study attempted to ascertain what knowledge and skills are required for NUL librarians to meet the information needs of humanities undergraduate students in the digital era academic library environment. To address the objective of this study, the following research questions were generated: what are the library related information needs of NUL humanities undergraduate students in the current digital age?; what knowledge and skills are required of NUL librarians in meeting the library related information needs of humanities undergraduate students in the current digital age?; to what extent has technology affected the roles and functions of NUL academic librarians?; to what extent are NUL librarians readily adapting to and embracing technological changes affecting academic library resources and services?; and, what type of education and training are required for NUL librarians to effectively meet the information needs of humanities undergraduate students in the digital age academic library environment? The study was supported by organizational learning theory. It employed a convergent parallel mixed methods approach within a pragmativist paradigm for the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data to respond to the research questions guiding the study. A case study design was adopted in identifying humanities undergraduate students' information needs and concurrently ascertaining knowledge and skills requirements of NUL librarians. The target population included NUL librarians and humanities undergraduate students. Non-probability purposive sampling was employed to collect qualitative data (from the librarians) whist probability stratified random sampling was adopted to obtain quantitative data (from humanities undergraduate students). Data were collected via face-to-face semi-structured interviews with librarians and a structured questionnaire for students. In concluding, the study presents, inter alia, a blend of required disciplinary, generic and personal competencies for NUL librarians to meet the library related information needs of humanities undergraduate students in the current digital age. It recommends, inter alia, the adoption of effective organizational learning to build on NUL librarian's existing knowledge and skills so that they may more easily adapt to rapidly evolving technology and more fully meet the information needs of humanities undergraduate students