School of Information Management & Systems. M. Buckland. Spring 2000.
245 Organization of Information in Collections.

Why Take This Course?

Organizing information in purposeful ways is the most central concern of the Information Manager. That is why all SIMS Masters' students would be well advised to extend what they learned in 202 Information Organization and Retrieval by taking 245 Organization of Information in Collections. And if you deal with more than one information object, then you have a collection.

As the enabling technologies (paper, card, printing, microform, digital computers, telecommunications) evolve, the constraints on what is economically feasible has changed in interesting ways and will continue to change during one's professional career. But the principles and problems of organizing information are substantially independent of the technologies used (and needed) to implement them.

Management skills, programming skills, an understanding of societal and policy issues, and other elements in the SIMS curriculum are all important, but organizing information for specific purposes is a curricular ingredient that you are not likely to pick up from other departments.

Note: 245 has been scheduled in conjunction with 240 Principles of Information Retrieval and an effort will be made to coordinate the content of the two courses.