i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

26 August 2009

This course has been called "Information Organization and Retrieval" and has been the first core course siince the school opened, but that title only partly describes what the course is about.  The overall focus is on the intellectual foundations of IO  & IR:  conceptual modeling, semantic representation, vocabulary and metadata design, classification, and standardization. These issues are important whenever we develop IO and IR applications and apply technology to make information more accessible, useful, processable, and so on. Some people might call this course "Information Architecture" and that would be accurate if we derived the meaning of IA only from "information" and "architecture" but most of the time the IA phrase is used in a  much more limited and narrower sense, so I tend to avoid it.

There are lots of interesting and deep ideas and questions here, but that's not why we study them. We study them because understanding the ideas and answering the questions enables us to design, build and deploy better information systems and applications. So I try to make this course intellectually deep but ruthlessly practical at the same time.  To do so I'll employ lots of case studies and news stories about "information in the wild" and "information-intensive" applications.   All in all, this is a much broader set of contexts than you'd be learning and talking about if you'd gone to a more traditional library school or to an ISchool where the transition from a library school was more incremental

  "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush is a classic, nicely complemented by "My Life Bits", which describes an ongoing effort at personal information management that was inspired by the Bush paper.  The Rao paper explains the emergence and evolution of many of the foundational concepts and approaches in this course.  I'll let you decide what to think about the Borges paper.