LIS education in the digital age for an African agenda

Abstract

To provide an exposé of digital-age library and information science (LIS) education for an African agenda, this paper adopts an emergent qualitative research design by drawing on the literature on LIS education in Africa. It also draws on data gleaned from a survey of heads of schools of LIS in South Africa, and from content analyses of LIS school websites in South Africa and selected parts of the continent. The paper locates its narrative within Abbott’s chaos of disciplines theory and concludes that the LIS discipline’s “interstitial nature,” its “fractal distinctions in time,” and the resulting chaos of disciplines should not be seen as a crisis for LIS education in Africa and globally, but as an opportunity for a paradigm shift to broaden the LIS disciplinary domain and to stake an intellectual claim on this extended domain—and so contribute to the growth and development of LIS services in Africa within the context of an African development agenda.