Skip to content

Is Librarianship a STEM Profession?

From the SLA Community:

“I’ve never thought about whether information science is part of STEM, mostly because I already work in tech as part of the asset management community. I’m typically embedded with engineers working on asset management software. But now that I’ve thought about it, my degree program required me to learn python, and I learned markup languages like HTML and XML as well. I use them to manipulate data for taxonomy creation and as part of larger cataloging efforts. Many of the academic librarians I know are required to do scientific studies and publish before they can get tenure.

I did a little poking around and found this from the Congressional Research Service – it lists information science as part of the NSF definition of STEM, and this quote stood out to me. I put our piece of the puzzle in bold:

Some federal agencies, such as the NSF, use a broader definition of STEM that includes psychology and the social sciences (e.g., political science, economics) as well as the so-called core sciences and engineering (e.g., physics, chemistry, mathematics). Others, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), use a narrower definition that generally excludes social sciences and focuses on mathematics, chemistry, physics, computer and information sciences, and engineering. Some analysts argue that field-specific definitions such as these are too static and that definitions of STEM should focus on “an assemblage of practices and processes that transcend disciplinary lines and from which knowledge and learning of a particular kind emerges.””

I’ll point you to this FAA video.

Librarians are Scientists?

youtu.be/5z1HF9_0zZg

 

  • Pro plugin deactivated or invalid

Posted on: May 12, 2021, 11:41 am Category: Uncategorized

By: Stephen Abram

Comments Off on Is Librarianship a STEM Profession?

0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.