Falling Short of Their Profession’s Needs: Education and Research in Library & Information Studies

Abstract

By taking a “library in the life of the user” rather than the conventional “user in the life of the library” perspective in his research on Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (2015), the author concludes that Americans have loved their public libraries for three reasons: information access, the library as place, and the commonplace stories that libraries supply by the billions. It is the view of the author that library and information studies research and education concentrate most attention on the first, hardly any on the last two, and as a result, fall short of meeting their profession’s needs.