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Mäkinen.

This chapter argues that including “studying up” (Nader, 1969), a close attention to elites and hierarchy, into the Library and Information Science (LIS) research agenda will strengthen the research the LIS community carries out on information behavior and use. Looking at issues that interest Nader, (i.e., the role class and inequity play in social life), this chapter reviews and critiques LIS user studies. The chapter then illustrates the value this approach can have for LIS researchers.

Fieldwork recently carried out in Maramureş, Romania, suggests that the cooption of science (both its authority and institutions) at local levels has helped the elite legitimatize and profit from cultural tourism as a development strategy. This research also suggests that the differential (elite) access to and use of information and knowledge especially when tied to local institutions and practices of science have been neglected in the analysis of change in post socialist states.

The introduction to Volume 22 of this series is situated with reference to science, commonsense and the role each has or should have in the work we do as Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals. What we have this year is a series of papers that reports research results from work done mostly in public and academic libraries. It seems that the research done in one domain can have much to say about the other. This is not to say that there are no differences between these two types of libraries, nor is it to say that these differences cannot at times be significant. However, it seems clear that many of the institutional aspects and the challenges that they both face today transcend the boundaries that we usually think mark these two ‘type’ of institutions off from one another.

The tension between what researchers can deliver, what they regard as reputable knowledge, and what practitioners “need to know” is one that is characteristic of all the “half” or “quasi” professions. We can, for example, trace out this tension in social work, nursing, and, to some extent, in business and architecture. But perhaps nowhere is the relationship between “science” and practice as problematic as it is in library and information science (LIS). There are any number of historical and ideological reasons we can invoke to account for this. However, no matter how we attempt to explain it or to “place” it into context (one gambit has been to tie this division to the collapse of University of Chicago's experiment in library science education), the fact is that it remains. Not only does it continue, it has become an invariant feature, a constant, in the intellectual landscape of the discipline. It is, we could also argue, a divide we see little hope of resolving in any kind of definitive way.

This volume brings together a range of reflective essays and empirical analyses of the changing character of the library world in what is sometimes called, “post-Soviet space.” Specifically, individual contributions from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the New Republic of Kosovo, and the post-Soviet successor states of Eurasia all provide different perspectives on Library and Information Sciences within the former Soviet Union and “Eastern Bloc” in terms of national and cultural identity and diverse institutional contexts. Thus, the included chapters range in focus from broad transformations in National Libraries and national library systems to the more specific problems facing municipal and local public libraries and information institutions within decentralized and, in some cases, privatized post-Soviet environments.