21:122 Conceptual Foundations
Fall 2007
Thursdays: 5:30-8:00 p.m.
3 Credits
3092 Main Library

Professor Padmini Srinivasan
email: my email address in in this link
Office: 3067 Main Library (335-5708)
Office Hours: Tues & Wed, 2:30-4:30pm and by appointment

Welcome to our course homepage!

Contents

Assignments

Text Book

The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, Elaine Svenonius. 2000. ISBN: 0262194333 (will be available at the IMU bookstore).

We will also read papers/book chapters that are mostly available on the Web either for free or through the UI library system. Some items may be placed only on reserve.

Additional Requirements

Students must have ready access to a computer connected to the Internet that has a browser such as netscape. Additional readings will be provided via this web site.

Students may need an account on mingo, the SLIS server. Please contact Becky Thoms if you do not already have an account. Mingo is a UNIX machine. Therefore students will need to know basic commands in UNIX such as ssh, scp, ls etc. Learning these is entirely the student's responsibility.

Here is a UNIX help sheet (thanks to Samantha Wilkstrom)
Here is a help sheet on PICO (thanks to Samantha Wilkstrom). PICO is an editor that allows you to create files/documents in mingo - such as an html file.

Special Considerations

I would like to hear from anyone who has a disability which may require seating modifications or testing accommodations or accommodations of other class requirements, so that appropriate arrangements may be made. Please contact me during my office hours.

Course Description

The conceptual foundation of library and information science as a discipline has substantial depth and breadth built over at least the last several hundred years. Focussing primarily on concepts and principles underlying information organization we have contributions from stalwarts such as Cutter, Ranganathan, Dewey and Lindberg. These and many others define a rich legacy of serious thinking on conceptual systems for organizing the world's knowledge. These ideas reflect backgrounds in linguistics, philosophy, systems thinking etc. In this course we will take a broad overview of the foundational ideas that govern information organization in various spheres. As examples, we will study classic frameworks offered by the Library of Congress, conceptual frameworks created on-the-fly as well as special purpose ontologies that are core to current day innovations such as the Semantic Web.  A strong foundation in the concepts and principles underlying information organization is fundamental to a successful information scientist.

Evaluation Points

Students are expected to participate in class discussions, complete all readings and complete any assignments on time. Assignments are due at the "beginning" of the specified class period.

Students are expected to do their assignments and exams on their own - unless explicitly permitted by the professor. Cheating/plagiarism will result, at least for the assignment in question and possibly for the full course, in a score of zero. If in doubt whether something is permitted, do ask me.
 
Item Points
Assignments & Quizzes 25%
Class participation 5%
Midterm (11/08) in class, closed books 30%
Final Exam, Dec. 17, 4:30 - 6:30 pm (closed book) 40%

Highlights, Notes etc.

Schedule (Will be edited as needed)

Session 1: Introduction to Course & About Information

  1. Svenonius Preface & Chapter 1 of The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization

Session 2: Why organize Information?

  1. Svenonius Ch. 2. Bibliographic objectives
  2. How Much Information? (2003 edition) - Lyman, Varian et al. School of Information Management and Systems, UC. Berkeley. (Read the executive summary)
  3. How many libraries in the US?


Session 3: Forms of Information

  1. Svenonius Ch. 3. Bibliographic entities.
  2. Fundamental Forms of Information, by Marcia Bates. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(8) (June 2006) (get through InfoHawk).
  3. MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything, by Gemmell, Bell, and Lueder. Microsoft Tech Report. (February 2006)

Session 4. Collections of Information

  1. Lee, Hur-Li. (2003). Collection Development as a Social Process. The Journal of Academic Librarianship v. 29 no. 1 (January 2003) p. 23-31. (get through InfoHawk).
  2. DMOZ - open directory project. Check out its history on wikipedia.
  3. ALA Electronic collection development policies
  4. Organizing the world's information: Google's vision for the 21st century. Craig Silverstein's talk Oct. 06 at UNC Chapell Hill.

Session 5. Describing information

  1. Svenonius Ch. 4 Bibliographic languages
  2. Svenonius Ch. 5 Principles of Description

Session 6. Metadata:

  1. Svenonius Ch. 6. Work languages.
  2. Metadata for the masses (Dublin Core)
  3. Very brief introduction to EAD
  4. EAD Elements
  5. EAD examples
  6. Extras:
    1. Simple HTML tutorial from W3Schools. If you are curious about W3Schools read their about us section. 
    2. Simple XML tutorial also from W3Schools.  Read especially the difference between XML and HTML

Session 7.  More on metadata

  1. Svenonius Ch. 7 Document languages.
  2. Extras:
    1. More about XML: Look at the Cover Pages - look at the different applications under Technology Reports on the left menu.  Look for EAD under Government Apps.
  3. Metadata Interoperability and Standardization Achieving Interoperability at the Record and Repository Levels, by Chan and Zeng. D-Lib Magazine, 12(6), June 2006.
  4. What are Topic Maps, by Garshol.  XML.com 2002.
 

Session 8. MARC

  1. Library of Congress: What is a MARC record and why is it important?
  2. Library of Congress. (2004). Understanding MARC Authority Records: Machine readable cataloging

Session 9: more on MARC

  1.   guest lecture (Greg Cotton)

Session 10. Controlled vocabularies & classification

  1. Svenonius Ch. 8: Subject languages: introduction, vocabulary selection and classification.
  2. Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata, by Mathes
  3. Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A General Review by Hammond, Hannay, et al., D-Lib Magazine (April 2005)

Session 11. Controlled vocabularies & classification (continued)

  1. Svenonius Ch. 9: Subject languages: referential & relational semantics.
  2. A bit of history of LCC: Louis Chan article celebrating the centennial of the Library of Congress Classification

Session 12. Specific systems

  1. Svenonius Ch. 10 Subject language syntax.
  2. How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web by Denton. Nov. 2003.

Session 13. Ontologies & the Semantic Web

  1. Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology by Noy and McGuinness
  2. FOAF (Friend of a Friend).  Here is its Ontology (read to figure out the classes and properties in this ontology, don't worry about the RDF).
  3. The Semantic Web, by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila. Scientific American (May 2001)

Hot off the Press: Draft Report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

Session 14. General Vocabulary and Knowledge Resources

  1. Wordnet
  2. cyc

Session 15. Domain Specific Resources: UMLS

  1. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS): integrating biomedical terminology by Bodenreider, Nucleic Acids Res. 2004 January 1; 32(Database issue): D267–D270.
  2. UMLS Semantic Network. Documentation from NLM.

Session 16. User Perspectives.

  1. Realization of Four Important Principles in Cross-Cultural Digital Library Development. (pdf) by Downie.  JCDL 2003.
  2. Toward an integrated model of information seeking and searching (html).  by Bates. Keynote. The Fourth International Conference on Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts, Lisbon, Portugal, September 11-13, 2002.

Final Exam (closed book). December 17 @ 4:30-6:30 p.m.

The University of Iowa / School of Library and Information Science / email me from here