Mission statement
The goal of this course is to introduce I-School students to existing standards and practice for description and indexing of information resources. This course will be heavily concerned with library cataloging and indexing rules, thesaurus and indexing language design and construction, and evolving metadata standards (such as the Dublin Core, METS, MODS, etc.) and their use in description and indexing of documents in both paper and electronic forms. The goal is to use these systems to describe real documents (books, journals, and electronic documents such as Web pages) and to "learn by doing". The lectures will focus on the tools used for description and indexing of documents and how they are used. These tools will include standards, codes, and rule sets as well as online sources for shared cataloging and description information.