Digital Documents Curriculum Report

The "Digidoc" committee, composed of faculty, students, and a representative of the University Press, began designing a curriculum that would train students to provide digital document collection access and support, to be digital publishers and marketers, and to design and develop digital documents. It staked out its terrain of interest to be works that have been previously called electronic publications, online documents, Web resources, and multimedia materials.

The committee decided to build an interdisciplinary curriculum that would straddle the traditional fields of information studies, publishing, and of design. It would also include the building of business skills (such as marketing), and knowledge of legal issues (particularly copyright).

Committee tasks included identifying a core set of Digidoc competencies that all SI graduates should master, a set of basic skills that all student specializing in Digidocs should master, and developing tracks within the Digidoc curriculum to meet the needs of a number of a variety of potential students. Existing courses (both within SI and in other departments) had to be mapped to each of the tracks, and the need for new courses identified.

As the curriculum was developed, it became clear that the existing university rules and practices posed distinct problems in trying to implement such an interdisciplinary graduate program. Because the committee felt that existing practices might prevent this interdisciplinary program, they recommended a list of changes to the existing structure.

Because it has been uncertain what role the Digital Documents program would play in relationship to the curriculum of the new school (concentration, subspecialization, program track), the committee has been on temporary hiatus. It plans to resume design and implementation of the program when its role becomes clear.

Implementation

The committee met intensively throughout the summer and fall of 1995. It produced several narrative scenarios of potential students passing through the Digital documents program, and described what their individual programs might look like. The committee identified basic and advanced skills in digital documents and thought about possible placement for its graduates. Howard Besser reported on the progress of the Digital Documents program at the 1996 faculty retreat and received comments and suggestions on the design of the program and it's role in the school.

The Digital Documents Committee is scheduled to meet with Dean Samuels of the School of Art and Design on April 15, 1996 to discuss the relationship between their programs and SI and to discuss how our interests might be served in pending School of Art and Design faculty recruitment efforts.

Context

In the course of developing a curriculum emphasis in digital documents, the committee encountered some general curricular problems. These problems will need to be addressed within our program in order for a Digidoc emphasis to be successful; these problems will also arise in attempts to develop other new and innovative curricular tracks

• Undergraduate courses
  If a school wants to encourage interdisciplinary studies, it must expect that its students will have to take some basic courses in other departments. In many cases these will have to be undergraduate level courses (as students will not be prepared enough for courses designed for graduate students in that department). At the UofM, under current policy, graduate students cannot get credit for taking undergraduate courses. The committee strongly urged the faculty to explore ways of allowing students to receive credit for certain identified undergraduate courses. Possible ways of doing this (some of which may not be feasible) include:
  
  • Allow selected undergraduate courses for graduate credit within certain contexts
  • Cross-list undergraduate course as graduate courses
  • Co-develop new special graduate-level courses with these other departments

• Program length
  The Digidoc committee has serious misgivings about a program of only 36 hours, the current program length at SI. The faculty consider either a longer program or (at minimum) a 36-hour program plus an experiential component (see below). As other institutions develop similar programs, they will need to pay careful attention to designing requirements that are both practicable and adequate.
  
• Experiential component
  Most students in the Digidoc emphasis should complete an experiential component (like an internship or directed field experience). A method for requiring this must be developed; this will call for some consideration of this requirement's effect on the credit hour requirements.
  
• Number of outside courses allowed
  In order to encourage interdisciplinary work, a Digidocs program needs to allow a student to take several courses outside the home school or department. The SI program currently allows only two outside courses for credit, a stricture which will need to be altered for Digidocs students.
  
• Infrastructure requirements
  A program like Digidoc cannot exist without a strong technological infrastructure base including facilities and staff .
  
• Placement
  A Digidoc program will also require pro-active work on placing students in jobs when they graduate.
  
• Required courses
  The committee expects that some students will enter the program with significant experience in particular areas. The School will need to be flexible in waiving certain basic competency requirements in areas in which students already have significant experience.
  
• Course development
  The School will have to develop a number of new courses in order to make such a curricular emphasis a success. And the process of course development will have to be an ongoing one, as new areas of focus will continue to arise.
  
• Adjustments to existing core curriculum
  In identifying the basic skills necessary for students in the digidocs program, the committee came to recognize that some of these skills would be important to all information professionals of the future. Therefore the committee needed to suggest several changes be implemented into the existing core curriculum. These will need to be taken up by a larger faculty body.
  
• Need for certification program/continuing education
  In such a mercurial field, we should find a way to provide continuing education to experienced professionals. This might be through some combination of workshops, institutes, and continuing education courses leading to some form of certification.
  

Future Plans

Developing a Digital Documents curriculum has helped elucidate the competencies and skill sets that future information professionals should have. The identification of relevant courses in many different departments shows how interdisciplinary this field of study is. And the process of outlining a program of study has exposed many departmental and University-wide policies and practices that tend to impede new interdisciplinary programs.

Future work in this area will seek to complete the mapping out of tracks and a full curriculum, as well as deal with actual implementation issues. Existing and new faculty with a commitment to maintaining the timeliness of the curriculum and to mentoring students in this area will need to be recruited to the program. The program will also need to build relationships with businesses and institutions that can provide students with experiential opportunities. Finally, we will need to recruit students to the program; several students coming in for the summer and fall 1996 terms have already expressed an interest.

Dissemination

Howard Besser has met and brainstormed with representatives of a number of institutions which have programs that overlap with one or two of the Digidoc components. In addition, Dr. Besser has publicized Digidoc curriculum planning at a number of different professional meetings (see below), and has folded feedback from these meetings into further curriculum planning. Dr. Besser's paper summarizing the first year of Digidoc efforts was published in a set of IEEE conference proceedings (see below).

Publications

Designing a Digital Documents Curriculum, in M. Stuart Lynn (ed.), Proceedings of the 29th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Volume 5: Digital Documents, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996, pages 153-158

Talks Given

Developing a New Curriculum for Digital and Multimedia Publishing Computers in Libraries, Washington D.C., February 29, 1996

Building a Curriculum for Digital Documents Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, January 4, 1996

Teaching With Electronic Documents American Society for Information Science, Minneapolis, May 25, 1995

WWW Documents

Introduction to Digidocs

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