Everything Old is New Again: The Evolution of Library and Information Science Education from US to iField

s of papers presented at the 2006 and 2008 iConferences. The course titles and course descriptions for master's level courses listed on the websites of the 14 iSchools in 2008, and those for the 14 randomly selected other schools were analyzed for word frequency and the rank order of the ten most frequent words in each list were compared as shown in Table 4. Variation occurs at the third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and tenth positions. Eight of the words appear on both lists: information, library, systems, services, management, resources, research and issues. The iSchools list includes two words that do not appear on the other schools list: design (7th position) and development (10th position). The other schools list also includes two words that do not appear on the iSchools list: materials and media. The reversed order of the words systems (associated with information systems and technology) and services (associated with libraries) lends further credence to this interpretation of evidence of conflict. Word frequency analysis was also conducted on the abstracts of the papers presented at the 2006 and 2008 iConferences (see right column of Table 4). Only three words appear on all three lists: information, systems, and research. The iConferences and iSchools lists have one additional point of agreement: design. There are no additional points of agreement between the iConferences and other schools lists. Six words appear only on the iConferences list: technology, field, community, discipline, students and social. In these data sets a pattern of split, conflict and ingestion is evident. As noted above, the two lists derived from the course titles and descriptions include four words that do not appear on both lists (split): design and development (iSchools only) and materials and media (other schools only). The first pair is generally associated with information systems and technology, while the second pair is more often associated with print materials and libraries (conflict). Of the eight words that appear in both course title and descriptions lists, five—library, systems, services, management and resources appear to be concrete and provide evidence of interstitial character and ingestion of the weaker line (other schools) by the better resourced line (iSchools). Two are abstract concepts that signify the ingestion of the traditional professional discourse into the rhetoric of the new iField: issues (traditional/professional) and research (new/disciplinary). The persistent freTable 4: Current Word Frequency Rankings. Word Frequency Ranking