In my recent paper about the research on library and information science education (access a free version of the paper) that was published in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, I examined 1,986 articles on LIS education published from 1999 to 2018 to find out what has been the concern of LIS researchers when it comes to its education. The analysis revealed that LIS researchers have been more concerned with what to teach (i.e. curriculum; 793 articles) than with how to teach (i.e. pedagogy, 128 articles). Teaching organization of information (including cataloguing, classification, and metadata) was the most researched topic. While some topics such as e-learning have consistently been the subject of research for a good part of the last two decades, in recent years topics such as political literacy, crisis management, privacy, digital humanities, and GLAM convergence have emerged in the literature.
One of the interesting findings was the coverage of the educational aspects of different sectors such as academic libraries, school libraries, and public libraries and so on. Academic libraries were by far better covered than the other types of libraries with 63 articles focusing on academic libraries or librarians. About a third of them were related to professional development and training for academic librarians and a few other papers were about mentoring. Subject librarianship was also among more frequent topics. About half of these papers were published in the first half of the 2010s. The treemap above illustrates the top keywords appearing in the titles/keywords of the papers. The size of the rectangles represents the frequency of the terms and colour similarity indicates co-occurrences of the terms, for instance, competency and professional, or education and train tended to appear together in the same titles.
References
Jamali, H. R., & Nabavi, M. (2021). Scholarship of teaching and learning: Evolution of research on library and information science education, Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 62(3), 287-302.
