Library science is mostly done in “

Library science is mostly done in “Library schools the institutions where librarians are educated qua librarians.
Such schools tend to have a monopoly on the education of general librarians for public libraries. They also have important parts of the market for special librarians academic librarians or librarians in research libraries, in private libraries (e.g. business libraries, libraries in the biomedical sector, etc.), and in the database industry.
In research libraries most professional positions tend to be filled with people having their main education from library schools, while somewhat less than half of the positions tend to be filled with subject specialists. Such subject specialist mostly has a master's degree or PhD in a subject (e.g. law, medicine, music, or history) and in addition a degree from a library school.
Documentation and information science originally perceived themselves as alternatives to library science. They were mostly affiliated with research institutions (often in the technological fields).
Documentalists information scientists made less priority to building and maintaining collections, and more to serving the users. Besides being more service minded they were more engaged in utilizing modern technology. Implicitly they often operated from a background in subject knowledge (but this was not at that time developed into some kind of theoretical view).
Since about 1975 documentation and information science has more and more been affiliated with schools of library science (often changing their names to School of Library and Information Science, LIS), and more and more researchers publishing in journals of information science, have their affiliation with such schools (possibly due to both an increase in the interest of the library world, and a decrease in possibilities outside library schools).
The most critical question for developing a corpus of knowledge in librarianship, documentation, and information science, has in my opinion been the problem of subject knowledge: how to develop general knowledge, which does not dissolve into concrete subject knowledge. One strategy has been to concentrate on IT-issues. Another strategy have been to psychologize (e.g. Belkin's concept of Anomalous States of Knowledge, ASK). My own strategy has been to develop what I call domain analysis (Hjorland & Albrechtsen, 1995). More on this in the section about theory. What I would like to ask at this place is this:
Is the content (and the truth) of research in LIS influenced by its institutional affiliations?
My answer is yes. Professional knowledge is to a large degree influenced by institutional ideologies. Psychologists, for example, tend to develop universal theories about thinking and cognitive development as opposed to domain specific theories, and librarians also tend to neglect domain specific factors in information work. The same is also the case with other professions. Sometimes knowledge in one discipline can be more or less implicitly in contradiction with knowledge in other disciplines or with general recognized knowledge. Such ideologies can be a barrier for the further development of the field, and also negative for the profession, which they were meant to serve.
It is important to develop a body of general and respected knowledge in LIS, but such knowledge should be based on a realistic philosophy, not on ideologies constructed to suit some unrealistic dreams. In my opinion LIS is a very important field of study with conditions to develop much relevant and respected knowledge.