LIS 5043 Organization of Information and Knowledge Resources / Spring 2018

Instructor: Dr. June Abbas

Course Objectives:

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• To acquire a comprehensive understanding of the principles, methodologies, and practices fundamental to information organization and knowledge resources; and

• To become familiar with issues, trends, and key people in information organization and knowledge representation.

 

Learning Objectives:

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• Understand the human, social, and policy issues inherent in organization of information and knowledge resources.

• Describe the needs for and identification and organization of information and knowledge resources,

• Analyze the need for organizing and representing information in a variety of institutional settings.

• Analyze search tools, web sites, and other information/knowledge management products.

• Describe, compare, and contrast major representation techniques, methods and tools.

• Evaluate several types of information packages and retrieval sources.

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My experience:

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     This course was essential to my understanding of information organization for the purpose of its access.  Through assignments I was able to search for information to enlighten myself on how I personally look for it.  This gave me a basis to refer to as I was learning the different theories and concepts in class.  One of the assigned readings that resonated with me was Michael Buckland’s “Information as a Thing.”  He described information as a thing, a process, and information as knowledge.  Each of these definitions fulfilled my needs as far as applying each of those definitions to a librarian or archivist role. I often went back to this reading and others by Buckland to gain a better understanding of informational concepts and to aid in synthesizing the different courses I took, including this one.

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     The class also allowed me to study theory for representing information for access.  We focused on bibliography, cataloging, and OPAC systems.  Dr. Abbas used a wonderful pretend “Forever Frog Store” to demonstrate the concepts.  I was able to see the practices at work.  It also helped me immensely for the final project of creating our own organization system designs. 

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     It was difficult to take so much in over the course of sixteen weeks, however, it gave us the opportunity to imagine and build our own collections, and to design OPACs that met the needs of the demographics we were serving.  I explored the types and levels of knowledge to ascertain what type of system design was needed, and applied WEMI And FRBR concepts to attributes for the design. The project provided me with invaluable understanding of all these practices at work from the ground up. 

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     After this class ended, I went back to it quite often using the lectures and the "Forever Frogs Store" to apply what I learned to other classes such as Cataloging and Indexing and Information and Communication Technology.  Although a very difficult class, it was a large part of the foundation needed to navigate and learn the concepts and practices within library and information science.  It was a challenging and enjoyable experience! 

 

Buckland, Michael K. 1991 “Information as a Thing.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42(5) : 351-360.

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