What Is Library Science? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Library science is the academic and professional field that studies how information and knowledge resources are organized, stored, retrieved, preserved, and made usable — by people, institutions, and increasingly by software systems. It asks a recurring set of questions: How should a collection of documents, objects, or data be described and classified so someone can actually find what they need? What structures (catalogs, metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies) make that possible at scale? How do people actually search for and use information, and where do those systems fail them? And how should an institution manage the full lifecycle of what it holds, from acquisition through long-term preservation or eventual disposal? Library science sits at the applied end of the broader information science field: information science is the more general study of how information is created, represented, transmitted, and used, while library science applies that body of theory specifically to libraries, archives, and the professionals who run them — which is why most graduate programs in the field are now titled Library and Information Science (LIS) rather than library science alone, and many are housed in university “iSchools” alongside computer science and data science programs.

What Library Science Actually Studies

At its core, library science treats information organization as a solvable design problem. A library, archive, or digital repository is only useful if a person (or a machine acting on a person’s behalf) can locate the right item among thousands or millions of others, understand enough about it to know it’s the right one, and access it in a usable form. That problem recurs across every kind of collection — books, journal articles, government records, museum objects, research datasets, web pages — and library science studies it in general, transferable terms rather than one collection type at a time.

The field covers several distinct but related layers of that problem:

• Description and classification — assigning consistent, structured metadata and subject categories to an item so it can be found by subject, author, format, or other facets.
• Information retrieval — the theory and design of the search systems, indexes, and ranking logic that turn a query into a useful result set.
• Information behavior — how real people search for, evaluate, and use information in practice, including where their behavior diverges from how systems assume they’ll behave.
• Collection stewardship — selecting, acquiring, preserving, and eventually deciding what to retain or deaccession from a collection over its lifecycle.
• Access and service design — the institutional and interface layer (reference services, discovery systems, instruction) that connects a collection to the people who need it.

Because this work spans public libraries, academic and research libraries, school libraries, special libraries (corporate, legal, medical, government), archives, and digital repositories, library science is inherently interdisciplinary: it draws on computer science and information retrieval, on organizational and cognitive psychology (to understand information behavior), on management and policy (for how institutions are run and funded), and, in its research-facing subfields, directly on the same scholarly-communication infrastructure — standards bodies, persistent identifiers, metadata schemas — that the rest of this site covers from the research-administration side.

How Library Science Relates to Neighboring Disciplines

Library science’s closest relationship is to information science, which is why the two are usually taught together as a single field (LIS) rather than as separate programs. Information science is the broader, more theoretical study of information itself — its representation, transmission, and use across any context, not just libraries — while library science is its most established applied domain, historically grounded in the practice of running libraries and has since expanded to archives and digital collections generally. In practice the boundary is porous: a researcher studying how people search a library catalog and a researcher studying how people search the open web are often using the same theoretical toolkit.

Library science also overlaps substantially with archival science (records and archives management shares the same description/classification/preservation core, formalized in standards such as ISO 15489), with computer science (particularly information retrieval, databases, and digital-library systems — see CASRAI’s guide on what computer science studies), and with data science, where curating, describing, and making research data findable is now a core library function (see what is data science). It also connects to fields covered elsewhere in this branches-of-science series that share its concern with how information moves between people and institutions, including communication studies and, on the quantitative/operations side of managing large collections and service systems, operations research.

Major Branches and Subfields of Library Science

• Cataloging and classification — the description and organization of items using controlled schemes (e.g. the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification systems) and cataloging standards, so a collection is searchable in a consistent way rather than ad hoc.
• Archives and records management — appraising, arranging, describing, and preserving records with enduring value, including the retention/disposition decisions organizations face over a document’s full lifecycle.
• Digital libraries and digital preservation — building and sustaining born-digital and digitized collections, including the technical work of keeping formats readable and content authentic over decades, not just years.
• Information retrieval and human-information interaction — the design and evaluation of search and discovery systems, and study of how people actually query, browse, and interpret results.
• Bibliometrics and scholarly communication — the quantitative study of publication, citation, and impact patterns (see CASRAI’s guide to bibliometric analysis methodology), closely tied to the scholarly-publishing infrastructure — journals, repositories, persistent identifiers — that research libraries increasingly help manage directly.
• Knowledge management — applying LIS organization principles inside organizations (especially special libraries in corporate, legal, and government settings) to capture and reuse institutional knowledge.
• Youth services and information literacy — programming, instruction, and collection development for children and young adults, and teaching information-evaluation skills more broadly, a major function of public and school librarianship.

These subfields map loosely onto professional practice settings — academic/research libraries, public libraries, school libraries, special libraries, and archives — each with a somewhat different emphasis on the subfields above, though the underlying theory is shared across all of them.

Who Funds Library Science Research

In the United States, the dominant federal funder of library science research and practice is the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent federal agency whose Grants to State Library Administrative Agencies program is the largest single source of federal funding for public libraries nationwide, distributed to state library agencies by a population-based formula. IMLS also funds library-specific research and workforce development more directly through the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program (funding projects that address critical needs across the library and archives fields, including applied research) and the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (funding professional development and training for library and archives professionals, including graduate education). IMLS separately administers Native American and Native Hawaiian library services grant programs for tribal and Native Hawaiian communities.

Beyond IMLS, library and information science research is funded in more targeted ways by several other federal bodies. The National Institutes of Health funds biomedical and health information science research primarily through its National Library of Medicine (NLM) — itself the world’s largest biomedical library and, notably, a component of NIH rather than a separate agency — whose mission explicitly includes conducting and supporting research, development, and training in biomedical informatics and health information technology. The National Science Foundation, mainly through its Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and particularly its human-centered computing work, funds research at the boundary of information retrieval, digital-library infrastructure, and human-information interaction. The National Endowment for the Humanities, through its preservation and access-focused grantmaking, funds humanities collections digitization and preservation work carried out largely by libraries and archives. Among private funders, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has long been one of the most significant non-federal supporters of academic and research libraries, funding digital scholarship infrastructure, cataloging and metadata initiatives, and humanities collections work at research institutions.

Typical Research Methods, Tools, and Practices

Because library science studies both people and systems, its research methods span both the social-science and computational toolkits:

• User and information-behavior studies — surveys, structured interviews, observation, and usability testing used to understand how people search, browse, and evaluate information, and where catalog or discovery-system design fails them.
• Bibliometric and citation analysis — quantitative study of publication and citation patterns, often using dedicated software such as VOSviewer, CiteSpace, or Bibliometrix (see CASRAI’s comparison of those three tools) to map research fields, collaboration networks, and influence.
• Content and metadata analysis — systematic examination of how collections are described, categorized, or represented, including audits of metadata quality and consistency using schemas like Dublin Core.
• Systems and interface evaluation — usability and accessibility testing of catalogs, discovery layers, and digital repository platforms, informed by human-computer interaction methods.
• Standards and infrastructure work — much of the field’s practical output is the development and maintenance of shared cataloging and metadata standards (through bodies such as NISO) rather than traditional hypothesis-testing research; standards like NISO Z39.29 for bibliographic references are a direct example of that work.

Common tools of the trade include integrated library systems and discovery layers used to manage and expose collections, digital repository platforms for hosting institutional and open-archive content, and dedicated metadata-editing and authority-control software for cataloging work.

Career and Training Pathways

The standard entry credential for professional librarianship in the United States is a master’s degree — typically a Master of Library Science (MLS) or Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) — from a program accredited by the American Library Association (ALA); many academic-library, government, and special-library positions specifically require ALA-accredited credentials. These are usually one- to two-year graduate programs combining coursework in cataloging/classification, reference and information services, collection management, and (increasingly) data and information-technology skills, often with a practicum or internship component. A growing share of programs are housed in interdisciplinary “iSchools” that combine library science with the broader information science field, reflecting the overlap described above. Researchers and faculty in the field typically pursue a PhD in library and information science following the master’s.

Professional societies play a significant role in the field’s continuing education and standards-setting: the American Library Association is the field’s largest and most established professional body across library types; the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is the primary scholarly society for information-science research specifically; and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) serves the archives and records-management branch of the field. Unlike some regulated professions, most librarian roles do not require state licensure, though public school librarians typically need a state teaching credential or school-library certification in addition to their library degree, and some states certify public librarians separately.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is library science the same as information science?

Not exactly, though the two are closely linked and usually taught together. Information science is the broader study of how information is created, represented, and used in any context; library science is its longest-established applied domain, grounded in libraries and archives specifically. Most graduate programs now cover both under a combined “Library and Information Science” (LIS) label.

What is the difference between a librarian and an archivist?

Both apply the same underlying description-and-preservation principles, but to different material: librarians typically manage published, multi-copy materials (books, journals, media) organized for broad public or institutional access, while archivists manage unique, often unpublished records and documents, with a stronger emphasis on provenance, original order, and long-term custodial history. Many professionals train in both through overlapping coursework.

Do you need a graduate degree to work in a library?

For professional librarian roles — especially in academic, government, and larger public libraries — an ALA-accredited master’s degree (MLS/MLIS) is the standard requirement. Library support-staff and paraprofessional roles typically do not require a master’s degree, though they often benefit from library-specific coursework or certificates.

What kinds of jobs does a library science degree lead to?

Beyond traditional public, academic, and school librarian roles, LIS graduates work as archivists, records managers, digital-collections and metadata specialists, data curators and research-data librarians, corporate and legal information specialists, and UX/discovery-systems designers — reflecting the field’s spread across information organization, technology, and user-facing service work.

Where Library Science Fits Among the Sciences

Library science is one of many disciplines profiled in CASRAI’s Branches of Science series. As an applied domain of the broader information science field, it sits alongside computer science, data science, and communication studies as part of how the sciences organize, transmit, and make usable the knowledge they produce — the same underlying concern, from a different angle, that runs through CASRAI’s own coverage of scholarly communication and research-data standards.