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 either use the term “Library Science” or “librarianship”. In this way, they have implicitly asserted that “library and information science=library science=librarianship”. They have also alluded to this meaning in their criticism of the status quo of LIS education. Moreover, in attacking LIS education's focus on the institute of library, this criticism has also equated “the library” with “the library institution”, hence with “the physical library”. In this way, the iSchool Movement advocates have accomplished the following meaning construction: “library and information science=library science=librarianship=discipline about the library institute=discipline about the physical library”. It is this imposed meaning of the LIS discipline that legitimated iSchool Movement's agenda to reconfigure it into iField.

It is clear that the central meaning construction that legitimated both Lancaster's prophecy and iSchool's aspiration is to treat “the library” and “the physical library” as identical. This restricted meaning construction threatens not only the existence of the library, but also the sustainability of the LIS discipline. 2 figs. 5 tabs. 37 refs.