Library and information science (LIS) (sometimes given as the plural library and information sciences) is a branch of academic disciplines that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and protection/regulation of information, whether in physical (e.g. art, legal proceedings) or digital forms. 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, and by the 1990s almost all library schools in the USA had added information science to their names. Although there are exceptions, similar developments have taken place in other parts of the world. In Denmark, for example, the 'Royal School of Librarianship' changed its English name to The Royal School of Library and Information Science in 1997.
In spite of various trends to merge the two fields, some consider the two original disciplines, library science and information science, to be separate. However, it is common today is to use the terms as synonyms or to drop the term "library" and to speak about information departments or I-schools. There have also been attempts to revive the concept of documentation and to speak of Library, information and documentation studies (or science).
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