Developments in education for information: Will “data” trigger the next wave of curriculum changes in LIS schools?

The first university-level library schools were opened during the last quarter of the 19th century. The number of such schools has gradually increased during the first half of the 20th century, especially after the Second World War, both in the USA and elsewhere. As information has gained further importance in scientific endeavors and social life, librarianship became a more interdisciplinary field and library schools were renamed as schools of library and information science/ information studies/ information management/information to better reflect the range of education provided. In this paper, we review the major developments in education for library and information science (LIS) and the impact of these developments on the curricula of LIS schools. We then review the programs and courses introduced by some LIS schools to address the data science and data curation issues. We also discuss some of the factors such as “data deluge” and “big data” that might have forced LIS schools to add such courses to their programs. We conclude by observing that “data” has already triggered some curriculum changes in a number of LIS schools in the USA and elsewhere as “Data Science” is becoming an interdisciplinary research field just as “Information Science” has once been (and still is).