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Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2018 Vol.44 179

China’s national information security guarantee system based on the “National Security Law” is
also on the road to soundness and development.
In the future, the main research contents in this field should include the new information security
initiative defense technology, the overall linkage framework of the new information security
system, the all-round construction of the new information security cultural security system and
management system, the international information security sharing and risk prevention, and other
new contents about the construction of information security system as well.

No.3

Lancaster’s prophecy and iSchool’s aspiration: A cross-time discourse
analysis
YANG Xu〇 & YU Liangzhi
〇a*
Against the increasing marginalization of libraries and the Library and Information Science
discipline (LIS) in the iSchool movement, this paper performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis
of Lancaster’s famous prophecy of the extinction of libraries, the mission statements of iSchools
and the literature associated with the iSchool Movement. The study aims to reveal the particular
meaning of “libraries” constructed by Lancaster that legitimated his prophecy, the meaning of
“Library and Information Science” constructed by the iSchool movement that legitimated its
aspiration to replace LIS by iField, the affinity between the two meaning constructions and the
impact of all these on LIS.
The study shows that Lancaster, in associating libraries with the“permanent archive of
professional achievement”, “permanent record of human achievement as reflected in books,
periodicals, and other types of physical collections”, and disassociating them with “access to
information resources”, imposed on libraries the meaning of “library=physical library”. He also
alluded to this meaning in his statements about “librarians” and “the paperless information system”.
In so doing, he implicitly excluded some of the meanings that the library has lived through in its
over five thousand years of existence, such as the meanings of the library as society’s mechanism
to ensure effective information search and access and the meaning of it as a living organism. It is
Lancaster’s imposed meaning of libraries that legitimated his prophecy of their extinction.
Interestingly, the iSchool Movement advocates rarely use the term “Library and Information
Science” when they talk about the reconfiguration of information-related discipline. Whenever
they have to refer to the discipline on which the LIS schools and their education are based, they

* Correspondence should be addressed to YANG Xu, Email: dorayang1996@pku.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-5907-7016