The Department of Library and Information Science has a distinguished record of research, education and community outreach that spans many decades. It is a founding member of the iSchools consortium and our programs are recognized by Rutgers University through its national rankings as some of its best.
The department is characterized by a research and learning culture that is inclusive, diverse and cohesive, international in scope and local in impact.
Enhancing human experience and quality of life in a dynamic information world, our goal is to pursue pre-eminence and leadership through boundary-breaking research and innovative professional and academic programs.
As scholars and educators in the Department of Library and Information Science, we believe that information makes a profound difference in the lives of people, communities and organizations.
We undertake boundary-breaking research that seeks to understand and enhance people's lives by enabling and supporting their interactions with information in whatever contexts and forms that may happen.
We educate future-ready professionals in diverse information service and technology contexts. They are prepared to design, manage and evaluate systems and services that support people and communities' interactions with information, and they play a leading role in enabling people to create, use, and preserve knowledge. They are people-centered in their work, critical and reflective thinkers, creative problem solvers, and effective communicators.
Focus
We focus on the information needs of people in diverse social, organizational, and cultural contexts and on opportunities to design responsive information places, services, networks, and systems.
We focus on the dynamic intersection of data, information, and their creation, organization, use, and preservation for posterity to provide meaningful and adaptive services to individuals, information organizations, and communities.
We focus on designing, implementing, and evaluating information systems and services that enable access to information and learning how to optimize their usefulness in meetings organizational and community goals.
We focus on scholarly and professional leadership and the capacity to safeguard and make available the cultural, intellectual, and technological records of humankind. We understand the value of data, information, and knowledge in shaping human capacity to be productive, creative, and transformative.
Information Technology and Informatics major
Master of Information (MI), with concentrations in Library and Information Science; School Librarianship; Data Science: Informatics and Design Technology, Information and Management; and Archives and Preservation.*ALA-accredited*
The MI program is ranked #6 nationally by U.S. News & World Reports. (2022 ranking) Library and Information Studies #2 in School Library Media; #3 in Library Services for Children and Youth; #6 in Digital Librarianship; #10 in Library Information Systems
BA (ITI Major)-MI Dual Degree Pathway
Ph.D. Program, Library and Information Science area of concentration
Master of Health Communication and Information (Interdisciplinary effort)
To learn more about the faculty in the LIS department, visit the LIS Directory page.
Our faculty are scholars and educators with prominent national and international standing, recipients of distinguished scholarly and professional awards, and recipients of research funding from National Science Foundation, DARPA, ARDA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as numerous foundations, corporations and library and information science organizations, Google, and OCLC.
Our faculty publish in top-tier journals and proceedings as well as serve on their editorial boards, such as Information Processing and Management, Information Retrieval, Interaction with Computers, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Documentation, Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, Library Quarterly, and Journal of Learning, Media & Technology.
The research and scholarship of our international faculty draw on rich and diverse theoretical foundations and methodological traditions and contributes to new understandings, contemporary theory development, new methodological approaches, and innovative professional applications.
We actively pursue these studies in the context of diversity and social justice. We value the role of libraries and information organizations in promoting lifelong learning, participatory citizenship, and the public good. Connecting these research foci are common threads that define our scholarly contribution and distinguish our department as an iSchool.
The Behavioral Informatics Lab looks at multiple problems at the intersection of Big Data Analytics, Computational Social Science, and Multimedia Information Systems. The field of Behavioral Informatics focuses on sensing, understanding, and shaping human behavior in a data-driven manner.
The Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL) is dedicated to research, scholarship, education, and consultancy for school library professionals. It focuses on how learning in an information age school is enabled and demonstrated by school library programs, and how inquiry-based learning and teaching processes can contribute to educational success and workplace readiness for learners.
Through Community Design for Health and Wellness, the CDHW-IRG seeks to catalyze community-engaged, interdisciplinary, cross-campus research that creates solutions to the gaps, risks, and opportunities for health and wellness that lie at the intersections of population health, personalized medicine, and the evolving communication and information context in New Jersey and beyond.
SALTS, the Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technology and Society at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, brings together researchers interested in developing and/or using next-generation natural language processing technology that supports communication across cultural and social boundaries in areas such as digital libraries, education, public health, humanities, linguistics, and communication.
Power and inequality in Media and Technology Working Group -The roots of systemic inequality have structured our contemporary world. Those with economic and political power have upheld these patterns of inequality as they shape mediated discourse and technological development. We see it today as information and communication technologies are framed as neutral, colorblind, meritocratic arbiters of ever-wider swathes of public and private life while placing certain populations at higher risk, blaming them for their vulnerability, and exonerating powerful entities from accountability. Examples abound—from the manufacture of widely-used technologies that exploit the labor of the global working class, and the unequal distribution of internet access and health disparities, to the ways the media covers racially-motivated violence and corporate surveillance. As such, this interdisciplinary group explores a broad variety of media and information technologies’ intersections with society, with the goal of promoting justice, equity, and sustainability, as well as expanding on the scholarship of this multifaceted and important topic at SC&I and the university.
The Social Media & Society Cluster is a transdisciplinary unit within Rutgers School of Communication and Information that supports research that extends across the boundaries of the iSchool, communication, and media studies programs within the School. Consisting of faculty from the departments of Communication, Journalism and Media Studies, and Library and Information Science, our faculty offer an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, as well as a Master of Communication and Information Studies and a Master of Information.
The Health and Wellness Faculty Cluster brings together faculty across the school whose research, teaching, and service focus centrally on closing disparities and improving health and wellness outcomes for individual, groups, and communities in the U.S. and globally. Our work examines the evolving role that communication, information, and media play in facilitating personal and public health via a range of processes and mechanisms – health education and health literacy, risk communication, persuasion and social influence, social support, capacity-building, and informatics – and across a wide range of health challenges, including drug and alcohol addiction, cancer, HIV/AIDS, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, mental health, and wellness more generally.
“You never know where that degree will take you,” Segal said.
Multilingual access to public sector chatbots is key to fostering equitable digital health adoption, Rivera and Singh said.
The Real Men Read Program established by Grimes recently received a Library of Congress 2024 Literacy Program Award as an Emerging Strategies Honoree, and in our Q&A he shares insights on how libraries can support mental health for the communities they serve.
NJOLT enables Rutgers Library and Information Science students, library colleagues, and school administrators to discover the many innovative practices led by the librarians at New Jersey public and school libraries.
The School of Communication and Information’s LIS Department and iSchool faculty and doctoral students will attend and present at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the premier international conference in the field, from October 25-29, 2024, in Calgary, Canada. SC&I is honored to sponsor the welcome reception.
