Musings of a Frustrated Intellectual

I came into the LIS program with a notion that it was more a vocational training program than an academic discipline. My experiences over the last six weeks have not swayed me from thinking differently. While we read books and journal articles and write papers on a multitude of subjects, the focus of the LIS program is getting students ready to function in library and information environments. The purpose of all the studying, researching, and discussing is to prepare for the performing of tasks and making of decisions in an information environment. This is not the same as teaching students to understand a text or speak a language. Nor does library and information science have an equivalent level of background knowledge that scientific disciplines require. While I have come to recognize the importance of understanding the issues impacting the information profession, I have a hard time believing that these qualify as purely academic concerns. For me, the word "academic" has connotations of abstractions and ideas transcending the banality of life. The library and information profession only seems to be about these sort of banalities.