Library and information science

The focus for librarianship is the Humanities Reading Room - floor 2.

Collections

The Library and Information Science (LIS) print and electronic collections, comprising legal deposit, purchased and donated material, focus on both current practice and the history of libraries internationally. Information retrieval, digital libraries, library management, reference services and cataloguing are a few of the many topics covered in depth. Stock from the British Library Information Sciences Service-BLISS, formerly the Library Association Library, was incorporated in 1997. Recently acquired open access material, on display in the Humanities Reading Room – floor 2, is detailed in a quarterly accessions list.

Reading Room and enquiry services

In the Humanities Reading Room - floor 2 users can consult LIS reference material, recent monographs and latest journal issues and held on open access as well as collection items ordered via Explore the British Library. The latest journal issues are listed in the librarianship and information science journals locator (PDF format, 202 KB).

Registered users of the British Library have also access onsite to a number of LIS databases, electronic journals and eJournal collections.

CILIP members are entitled to a Reader Pass upon proof of membership, and subject to the identification and other requirements for reader registration.

In addition to the onsite enquiry service offered in the Humanities Reading Rooms, users can submit more complex enquiries via Ask the Reference Team.

The librarianship and information science reader guide (PDF format, 87 KB) gives further information about using our onsite services and key sources of information.

LIS Research Coalition resources

The Library and Information Science Research Coalition, a three-year project that ended on 31st July 2012, has worked to promote the development of research capacity in LIS and the translation of research outcomes into practice. The Coalition website and its resources remain accessible, but are no longer updated. A copy of the website has been harvested for preservation in the UK Web Archive.

Of particular interest to researchers are the Links pages to external LIS resources that were evaluated as part of the Research in Librarianship – Impact Evaluation Study (RiLIES) project. The accompanying leaflet Where to find resources to help with LIS projects (PDF format) summarises the information on these pages and is made available for distribution under CC BY-SA 2.0 licence. RiLIES explored also the extent to which funded librarianship research projects influence library practice in the UK and the project findings and downloadable documents can be found on the Research Impact Help pages.

The outputs of the AHRC-funded Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) project supported by the Coalition and the DREaM online community provide further major resources for LIS researchers and LIS practitioners interested in conducting research.

Current awareness

CILIP Calendar - branch and Group events
Current Cites - information technology in libraries
Information science conferences worldwide
InformationR.net - Prof Tom Wilson's list of freely accessible journals and newsletters
LIBDEX - journals and newsletters
LIS News.com - news and current events
Lisjobnet - appointments online from CILIP
The Researching Librarian
ZETOC - journal contents pages from the British Library

Digital libraries

Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries
DELOS - European Union funded research
Digital Curation Centre
Digital Preservation Coalition - preservation of digital resources in the UK
Digital Public Library of America
The European Library - portal to the catalogues of European national libraries
Europeana – explore the digital resources from Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections
PADI - National Library of Australia's gateway to digital preservation resources