The Library Association (LA) was founded in 1877 and granted a Royal Charter in 1898. It became a registered charity in 1963 and was awarded a supplemental Royal Charter in 1986, bringing its objectives and powers up to date, including the aim to "represent and act as the professional body for persons working in or interested in library and information services." It has nearly 26,000 members, the vast majority of whom are personal members in the UK, but it also has significant numbers of personal overseas members and over 700 institutional members worldwide.

The Institute of Information Scientists (IIS) was founded in 1958 to promote and maintain high standards in scientific and technical information work and to establish qualifications for those engaged in the profession. It also has charitable status. It has 2,200 members all of whom are personal members, including a significant number overseas.

There is a clear commonality of interest between the two organisations. Both memberships are engaged in the provision of information services in a wide range of settings. It is estimated that about 40% of IIS members are also members of the LA.

Both organisations accredit programmes at universities, increasingly on a joint basis. Both award professional qualifications, maintain active publishing programmes, run courses and conferences, have a regional and special interest group structure, and so on.

It is not surprising, therefore, that there have been previous proposals to unify these (and other) organisations to form a single, more powerful body to represent the broad information and library community.

The most recent concrete attempt to do so began in 1989 when Aslib: the Association for Information Management (Aslib) and the LA commissioned Professor Wilfred Saunders to consider the case for bringing Aslib, the IIS and the LA into a close working relationship. IIS co-operated fully with this exercise. The result was published in 1989 as Towards a unified professional organisation for library and information science and services: a personal view.⁽¹⁾

Saunders concluded that:

Collectively the Institute, Aslib and the LA represent an extremely powerful combination of expertise in information science, information management and librarianship in all its varied manifestations. There is a high degree of inter-dependence between all three of these areas and the potential for mutually beneficial interaction is great indeed. The case for this potential being achieved more effectively via a single unified organisation which includes the three organisations operating independently must be very strong indeed. ⁽²⁾

Discussions between all three organisations began. In 1991 LA Council agreed in principle to a proposal from the discussion group that the three organisations unify to form a new body. Soon after, Aslib Council decided not to proceed and subsequently IIS Council also decided not to go ahead.

Since then, there has been a degree of co-operation between IIS and LA, most notably in the sphere of accreditation of courses at universities. Most accreditation visits are now carried out jointly and the IIS is revising its procedures to further facilitate this process.