At first, as a new Master's student in Library & Information Science with a background in musicology and the humanities, I found it a bit hard to figure out what the profession of LIS and the social sciences generally mean by "basic" research. The term seems to mean digging into a topic deeply just to discover something (whether quantitative and/or qualitative), as opposed to figuring out how it might apply in "the real world." They call the latter "applied" research. In the humanities, I suppose we call the first kind of work "academic" and the second kind "public." We only occasionally call any of this work "research," and in musicology we've also only barely gotten into "applied"/"public" work.
