Full Sylabus in Adobe PDF format (244 KB)

Course Description

Generation, production, management, dissemination, and use of information. Roles of information in society, information seeking and user behavior, information industry, economics of information products and services, technological and organizational change, information professions, and issues. The course is not about libraries per se, but libraries will be the example used most often.

Course Structure

At the beginning of the course, which moves from the general to the specific, we will examine the concept of “information environment” and some historical insight into the larger profession and attempt to understand where our future lies. One purpose of the course is to enable the student to understand how the information professions fit into the larger information environment in political, social, and economic terms.

Another objective is to understand how the field is made up of both technical areas and professional issues. Understanding the professional model and the information life cycle will be valuable here. Hopefully, there will develop the beginnings of a vision of the larger field of information sciences and of the future: where we are now and where we are going. Throughout the course, lectures and discussions will focus on trends and issues and the role of information in society and how the information professions must examine our direction. We must better understand crucial issues such as censorship, ethics, and intellectual property, for example, since social relevance–how we are of value to the larger society--depends on professional activity in such areas, not on techniques.

To achieve our direction, there are–roughly–three large facets of the course’s content, and they will develop, mostly, as shown below:

I. Concepts (e.g., information and communication models; information creation and the information professionals’ roles; communication; knowledge; value addition; the information life cycle, evolution of information management)

II. Values/issues (e.g., intellectual freedom, censorship, ethics, information literacy, intellectual property/copyright)

III. Information disciplines and professions (e.g., professionalization model, convergence of the disciplines, metadisciplines, the major fields, some minor fields, emergent fields)
Objectives

The course content reflects its purposes:

• To enable the student to understand different stages and environments in which information is created, transferred and used,

• To enable the student to compare processes through which information is transferred,

• To introduce the student to general technological and professional issues, those handled more in more technical depth within the SIS curriculum, and

• To enable the student to interpret and evaluate the impact of a particular technology in an information environment,

• To prepare the student to move on to more advanced levels of study in the information sciences.