Information Technology in Librarianship

In the last 15 years, the ground – both in terms of technological advance and in the sophistication of analyses of technology – has shifted. At the same time, librarianship as a field has adopted a more skeptical perspective; libraries are feeling market pressure to adopt and use new innovations; and their librarians boast a greater awareness of the socio-cultural, economic, and ethical considerations of information and communications technologies. Within such a context, a fresh and critical analysis of the foundations and applications of technology in librarianship is long overdue.

Author Biography

Gloria J. Leckie is LIS program coordinator, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. She attained her MLIS and her PhD from the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include information seeking behavior, the work of scholars and professionals, academic librarianship, information technologies, information literacy and libraries as public space. Gloria is currently on the Board of the Canadian Association for Information Science as well as on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science

John E. Buschman is associate university librarian, Collections, Preservation & Scholarly Communication, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington, DC