Introduction

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.