Library_and_Information_Science
Library science is, it seems, the study of stuff having to do with libraries. Information science, on the other hand, is the study of how to organize information in general.
(The person who wrote the above knows nothing about what he's talking about. If you know more, please replace this with something more accurate!)
The person who wrote the above is not that far wrong. They just left out some detail.
It is generally accepted that the modern discipline of Information Science began with the publication by Claude E. Shannon of his article "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the Bell System Technical Journal in July and October of 1948. In the process of working out a theory of communications that could be applied by electrical engineers to design better telecommunications systems, Mr. Shannon defined a measure of entropy (H = -SUM pi log pi) that, when applied to an information source, could determine the capacity of the channel required to transmit the source as encoded binary digits. Shannon's measure of entropy came to be taken as a measure of the information contained in a message, as opposed to the portion of the message that is strictly determined (hence predictable) by inherent structures, like for instance redundancy in the structure of languages or the statistical properties of a language relating to the frequencies of occurrence of different letter or word pairs, triplets etc. See Markoff Chains. The field of Information Science has since expanded to cover the full range of techniques and abstract descriptions for the storage, retrieval and transmittal of information. It has little to do with the organization of information, unless you mean by that how databases are designed to organize information into data records.
Library Science, on the other hand, is exactly the "study of stuff having to do with libraries." Strictly speaking, Library Science consists of academic studies (most typically surveys) concerning how library resources are used and how people interact with library systems. These studies tend to be specific to particular libraries at particular points in time. Library Science is distinct from Librarianship, which is the practical services rendered by librarians in their day to day attempt to meet the needs of library patrons. Librarianship does not generally generate any new knowledge, and its purpose is not to advance any field or discipline. It is only occasionally that librarians engage in Library Science, and then usually incidental to their jobs as librarians. The study of Library Science is, however, part of the requisite training of librarians.
The term "Library and Information Science" is not really meant to be broken into these separate pieces. Library and Information Science is a hybrid academic field that grew out of library schools' fight for survival in the electronic age. The politics of academia, issues of status and prestige, issues of perceived obsolescence and doubtless other forces created these programs. Programs in Library and Information Science are interdisciplinary, overlapping with the fields of systems' analysis, computer science, statistics and various parts of the social sciences. Persons interested in the information science of Shannon are more likely to be electrical engineers or mathematicians; persons interested in database design are more likely to be computer scientists. Library and Information Science produces "information specialists" who may be librarians, indexers and abstractors, database managers, multi-media specialists or specialist researchers such as legal, medical or other technical researchers. The field of Library and Information Science is not defined by its output of information specialists, however, but by the "information specialists" who remain in academia teaching and doing research, by its literature, its journals and all the other ways in which an academic discipline is defined, the study of which, by the way, falls within the scope of Library and Information Science!