In the 21st century, the central purpose of most types of library is no longer to provide access to information but to energize connection and creation. In light of this, data and web specialists are the right people to turn libraries into knowledge services centers but they need new orientations, skills, and what might be termed knowledge behaviors. Despite the fact that data and web management teams rarely comprise more than one person, the disproportionate value they can bring to libraries demands that they rally together. Any research on how data and web specialists in libraries might collaborate would be welcome.
Information literacy, digital information system, paradox of digital system and traditional approach can be ideas for PhD research. However, the expertise of a student, resources s/he has, the mutual understanding of supervisor and student are more important to choose a topic and carry out the research.
Trends experienced by librarian's that started their librarianship carrier from diploma stage to their PhD level, against the librarians who join the profession either from the Masters or PhD level.
The five most popular topics were “information retrieval,” “information behaviour,” “information literacy,” “library services,” and “organization and management.” An overwhelming majority of the empirical research articles employed a quantitative approach.
If you want to do a PhD, your own personal interests and those of your potential supervisor should guide you. We don't know your strengths or background. There must be aspects of your first degree that really fired you up. You need that enthusiasm to carry you through the good days and the challenging ones.
The term Library and Information Science (LIS) was borne out of the need to merge two closely related fields – Library Science (LS) and Information Science (IS) – that deal with the management and handling of information.
Depending on your background, the contemporary issues in LIS today is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary branch of knowledge because its theories and practices required learning from other areas, shares areas of common interest with other fields, have a range of disciplines working together, converges approaches from separate areas and has areas seen as inherently interdisciplinary.