A Preliminary Study on the Curriculum Overlap and Gap between LIS Education and Intelligence Education

Overview & Synopsis

This paper addresses the curriculum overlap and gap between LIS education and intelligence education by analyzing the content of the websites of the intelligence education programs and courses in 27 representative intelligence education universities in the United States, and the intelligence-related programs and courses in the 56 LIS programs in the United States and Canada. The curriculum overlap lies in computer skills for information collection management, geographic information systems, data mining, knowledge discovery, competitive intelligence and information security, whereas the major curriculum gap lies in most intelligence analysis domain areas (such as military intelligence, political intelligence, science and technology intelligence) and many intelligence tradecraft areas (such as structured analytic techniques, intelligence theory and methods, intelligence policy and organization, intelligence operations, counterintelligence, intelligence writing and briefing). By filling some curriculum gaps based on the overlap, LIS education can extend to open source intelligence analysis in some domain areas.