L1. Course Overview
This course has been called "Information Organization and Retrieval" and
has been the first core course since 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 systems and applications that organize information. 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 I School where the transition from a library school was more
incremental. That said, there is lots to learn by studying libraries, museums, and other "memory institutions" so we'll discuss them too.
It may seem that there is an overwhelming amount of reading assigned for this first day of the course, but many of these are very short newspaper stories and the total number of pages to read is about 50. We're taking the broadest possible look at different contexts or situations in which information is being organized. Stand back and look for common concepts and concerns.