Opening keynote presented by Professor Blaise Cronin, Rudy Professor of Information Science, Indiana University. In his keynote presentation Professor Cronin will provide a brief historical overview of LIS research before critically reviewing competence and practice in the field. He will identify a number of deficiencies, including lack of cumulation, “narcissism of minor differences,” false antinomies, failure to scale, and redundancy. At the same time, he will highlight several trends that may (or may not) be seen as having potentially positive downstream effects: growth in the number of faculty from disciplines other than LIS populating LIS departments, increasing rigour and diversity of LIS research programs, quantifiable growth in the export of ideas from LIS to other disciplines, greater receptivity of LIS research to outsider literature. He will consider social media both as a means of fostering research collaboration and as a subject warranting significant research attention in its own right. He will conclude by considering a few domains in which LIS researchers may be able to establish a stronger presence.