In 1993, a Core Task Force at SILS devoted several months to discussion of what constitutes the core of knowledge for all students in a program to produce the leaders to create, organize, manage, and apply new forms of libraries and information resources. The Core Task Force identified "Organization of Information" as part of that core knowledge, and indeed as part of the intellectual core which is intrinsic and unique to information and library studies.
Our understanding of this core area is that its purpose is to impart an understanding of how information professionals can provide intellectual access to information. We are using the phrase "Organization of Information" to encompass broad and deep issues of providing intellectual access to information, including information resources in a variety of formats and settings. The topic can include principles of the organization, description, and subject analysis of information resources, and on standards and systems for the creation, organization, maintenance ,indexing and retrieval of document surrogates. We welcome your comments on how this topic should be defined or understood.
Over the past two years, the core course in Organization at SILS has undergone radical changes and has evolved from an a relatively "traditional" approach structured around core principles and practices of the cataloging and classification of print-based materials of libraries. The delivery of the course content followed traditional lines as well with, a lecture format, examinations and homework assignments emphasizing the mastery of specific tools such as AACR2, LCSH.
In general, the course at Michigan has moved from an emphasis on specific library tools and practices to a course which focuses on more general practices and principles in a wider range of information environments and with a larger number of document formats. The later version of the course has a greater emphasis on organization of electronic resources, an increased emphasis on project-centered learning, and a more central emphasis on general principles instead of specific organizational tools and practices specific to particular environments. Experience with traditional tools is still included, as students learn how to apply and evaluate these tools, but the tools are seen as exemplars of one possible approach to the organization of information. Project-centered learning provides "learning by doing" experience working in teams, and assignments involve providing deliverables such as a searchable database and a portfolio regarding decisions in the database organization and access. Our approach involves a rapid prototyping of the course, and uses student feedback to modify and inform the next version of the course. This course outline is available to listserv participants, and we invite your critique and comments.
An Organization Task Force has been formed at SILS to assess the evolution of the core course, its current status and necessary improvements, and to determine the need for and content of a specialization in this area.
We have identified the following questions to stimulate the discussion. Please feel free to jump in as well with your own questions:
This applies to the other options as well. If we can get over this hurdle, we may be able to look at the curriculum problem productively.
At my library school (nameless here ... it is ALA-accredited) we had the core course "Organization of Information" which replaced "Cataloging I." It was taught by whoever was new enough not to be able to talk their way out of doing it. In my case, it was taught by someone who was in telecommunications (he was brand new to the school) and who had never in his life cataloged a book. (Or, for that matter, any other item.)
Our big project was to come up with some rules and catalog a collection of ours. I cataloged my sweaters. We didn't look at AACR2 or LCSH or anything; after all, the professor had never used them.
I left that class with a stack of 3 x 5 cards with copious detail about my sweaters but with little else. I would have appreciated *any* kind of info about *any* kinds of sources that they used in the "real world."
In short, overall theory is nice -- I got a lot out of many of my theoretically based classes -- but please keep it grounded in reality too. Or you'll have graduates who will be writing letters like this in 3 years!
Wilson & Debons asked about the definition of "organization of information;" both of them pointed to the word "information." With all respect, I believe they pointed to the wrong word. The key in "organization of information" is "organization" and not "information."
To define it, organization is a kind of behavior in which one exercises one's power to enforce order in one's environment. In the practice of LIS profession, organization is the process of putting information bearing objects in orderly manners and, as the result of this process, creating systems. To succeed in doing so, the "orderly manners" must make sense to end users (good indexing structures/1 and interface display/2), to system designers (logical data structure/3) and to the organizer (standardized tools/4). For the system to survive beyond personal use, the practice must be compatible with common cognitive organization/5 of its users (both end users and designers) and their information seeking behaviors.
It is with this frame of definition that I design my teaching of "organization of information." (See JELIS 34(2), p.126). The five elements in the previous paragraph are translated to the following components for the course: psychological categorization, classification, vocabulary control, data structure (data models and MARC format and maybe markup language), indexing, document surrogates (bibliographic description and abstracting), authority control, system performance and system interface. The components may differ according to the focus of individual LIS programs, but I argue that the five elements must be included in order to present a balanced course.
To ensure long term impact of students' learning in "organization of information," the course must be at a conceptual level free from the boundary of one particular practice method. When the course contents are restricted only to cataloging (or indexing or database construction), students begin to define concepts only by that particular practice, and lose sight of the compatability among different methods.
But no concept will remain in the students' mind unless it is linked with current practice. The practice of organization in LIS is unique among all disciplines. Cataloging is probably the largest cooperative, shared, networked enterprise among all methods of organization on earth. Commercial indexing and abstracting (as well as online searching) services exist only in our field. They both have long history and practicing conventions. Besides the fact that it is indeed my privilege (one not available to faculty in other disciplines) to introduce the practice to students, it is truly a disservice not to establish links between concepts and current practice for my students.
To teach current practice in this course, it is not as important to introduce the four steps of cataloging or the eight steps of indexing as it is to evaluate the structures of the tools used (be it AACR2, MARC, ERIC Thesaurus, or MeSH) and how well (or not so well) the tools serve their users (both end users and the organizers). The goal of teaching current practice in this course is to make students understand how the structure of a tool has come about and how it can be made better to suit a particular group of users or a certain kind of information bearing objects.
One more thing. I believe it is important for instructors of this course to not confuse current practice with new technology. The evolution of courses in "organization of information" suggests that whenever technology brings us a new method of organization, there is immediately a call for abandoning the current practice in favor of the new technology in classroom. Although experimenting a new method may give students a sense of being at the cutting edge of technology, it will not achieve the goal of the course unless it is linked to current common practice through critical evaluations.
I am sorry to hear that Ms. Mathews had to organize her sweaters on a stack of 3x5 cards. My students know that I organize my household coupon collection in a database using dBase. The database is definitely more appropriate. Ms. Mathews's teacher needs to know that 3x5 cards are no longer the preferred device for organization in most libraries.
But serious .... The issue here is this idea we call "core." Placing a course in the core curriculum signifies the consensus among the faculty of a LIS program that the contents of that course represent core (or fundamental) knowledge of that particular area (in this case "organization of information") which all students in that LIS program must possess upon graduation. The faculty of that LIS program must go beyond merely making a course a core and must define what the core contents of that course should be, collectively. It is irresponsible act for any LIS program to leave it to the instructors of a core course to define what they wish to teach in the name of academic freedom. True that in reality it is difficult to get faculty members to agree on core contents, but it is not impossible, as we see what Michigan is doing now and what UCLA has done with this course.
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Strikes me that the "organization of knowledge" and the "organization of information" are two different things because knowledge and information are two different things. I've seen too many "organization of knowledge": curricula which really cover "description and classification of objects that may carry knowledge or information or both together with rules for organizing their surrogates" (my title! &:+) ) In other words, make cataloging and classification sound less old-fashioned by calling them "organization of knowledge." Let's call them what they are -- cataloging and classification -- and let's get at what information is, and why and how that might be organized, and then let's get at what knowledge is, and why and how that might be organized, too. What about indigenous knowledge, for example? What about the weekly logs of a listserv, for example? Et cetera!
I'd like to see a curriculum that incorporates and stands by a specific definition of information and a specific definition of knowledge and deals with them in terms of both access and transmission (or why one would want to organize them anyway). One severe problem of the information realm these days, IMHO, is that the English language doesn't have the vocabulary to cover the emergent concepts, even among those in the field, let alone convey them to people who aren't. Surely a curriculum might begin to contribute to this hiatus?
I would like to add to Tom Wilson's comments about the debate on the organization of information. Courses which focus upon the structure of existing classification systems always come up against the fact that these systems reflect the biases of their inventors and the structure of the literature in various fields when the schemes were invented. Students who have only learned the existing systems have a great deal of difficulty changing their minds over to conceptualizing knowledge in a broader concept.
I was the TA for a library school course in advanced cataloging and classification(the generic old name) in the late 1970's. I found a number of our brighter students had difficulty going back and forth in the different systems because they had no training in the area of information processing and classification from a pyschological perspective.In several instances, several years elapsed before we began hearing from those former students thanking us for exposing them to the concepts because it had become useful in their work settings.
>Wilson & Debons asked about the definition of "organization of information;" both of them pointed to the word "information." With all respect, I believe they pointed to the wrong word. The key in "organization of information" is "organization" and not "information."
Although I have no problems with his definition of "organization" and would agree with it entirely. My concern was with the fundamental underpinnings of what Ling sets out as necessary for professional education today - how are concepts formed and structured by human beings seeking to bring order into the world they find about them? And what can we learn from those processes so as to reflect them in the systems we design to provide access to information?
Margaret Slusser gets the point when she says:
>Courses which focus upon the structure of existing classification systems always come up against the fact that these systems reflect the biases of their inventors and the structure of the literature in various fields when the schemes were invented. Students who have only learned the existing systems have a great deal of difficulty changing their minds over to conceptualizing knowledge in a broader concept.
The course I described, which I now recall, was developed from about 1964 onwards (thirty years ago!) had exactly the purpose Margaret describes. It was NOT (as Jeanne Tifft fears - advisedly) a jazzy way to update cataloguing and classification - it was a prerequisite for what were then relatively traditional courses in those subjects (although "traditional" in the British sense - i.e., embodying already such concepts as facet analysis, etc.).
It is interesting (is that the word, or should it be "distressing"!) that these thirty-year old curriculum ideas appear still not to be fully understood and far from universal in their impact on the modern curriculum. But then - our profession appears to lack any sense of history - we stumble along, trying to keep up with technological developments, with barely a backward glance: onwards and upwards with the mountain crumbling under our feet.
And that includes cataloging!
During most of MLIS studies, I was being repeated that I, as a professional librarian, would be in supervisory positions. But how am I supposed to supervise library technicians deviating from ISM (the Canadian OCLC) if I am myself unable to read a MARC form?
In classes on information technologies, I had talks on multimedia documents, computer files, etc. But how am I supposed to organize these new information products if I never fully explored AACR2?
Professors, I understand that many of you felt powerless when you were confronted to automation. But please understand that students in LIS schools want to be librarians, not computer engineers.
Please remember that one of the basic of librarianship is still the organization of information.
If the current state of electronic exchange of information, particularly the much hailed growth of World Wide Web, provides any indication of future developments, we seem to be entering a stage in which all available information will coalesce into one gigantic, shapeless, seemingly chaotic, endlessly expanding heap or blob, unique among other heaps or blobs through a very special feature, namely: every little piece of information within this heap will be linked to at least one other piece, thus creating a mind-boggling mesh of interlinks and, what's truly special, making it possible to reach any given piece of information from any starting point. Searching for a proverbial needle in this kind of a haystack may be no pain at all.
Why do we organize information in the first place? Why do we organize anything at all, be it sweaters or household coupons? Some of us may do it for lack of anything better to do, some of us may do it for the fun of it, but the truly rational reason behind all this effort is to make it easier to find things later on, when we, or somebody else, will need them. That's why we categorize, number, label, select, etc. -- so that we know that this red pullover can be found in the bedroom closet, on the upper shelf, on top of the blue sweatshirt. We can get to it in no time. But let's try a different approach: let's take a long piece of twine and tie every little thing in our house to something else: toothbrush to a loveseat, loveseat to a toaster, toaster to the red sweater... Now, as long as we follow the twine patiently, we will get to this sweater, no matter whether we start from a toilet bowl, or the shelf with sweaters. Cumbersome, silly, time consuming - you may say. Sure enough, but what if we send a butler to retrieve things for us? And what if the butler is a robot that doesn't mind cumbersome tasks?
The point I am trying to make is, I am afraid, beyond mere quantitative improvements offered by new technology -- it is a wholly new frame of reference. I said "I'm afraid", because as a prospective student of library science I see the very basis of my future livelihood eroded and possibly eliminated. Never before in human history there existed a feasible prospect of making ALL information tied together as an invisible Moebius band and available to ALL (or MOST) literate people on this planet at the same time and at all places.
Therefore we do need to abandon fruitless fights over definitions and minute differences in emphasis and instead focus on fundamental re-examining of the role information professionals (primo voto librarians) want and can play in the emerging New (Dis-)Order of Information. Otherwise people like myself may end up cataloging sweaters for a living.
Professor Wilson is not the only one concerning about the fundamental underpinnings
>-how are concepts formed and structured by human beings seeking to bring order into the world they find about them? And what can we learn from those processes so as to reflect them in the systems we design to provide access to information?
Yes, I do hope students in this course of "organization of information" understand the fundamental underpinnings of the development of current systems. They need to know about psychological aspects of organization, philosophical aspects, some background in logics, mathematics, and computational theories.
When the course was developed at UCLA, Donald Case included in lectures Wittgenstein, Rosch, Lakoff, Johnson to expose students to psychological aspects of organization. I included Flint's classifications of sciences before introducing any classification theories. We want students to know that entity-relation model originates from computer science more than a decade ago; that business industry and government were very much interested in dbms the same time when our profession began to experiment information retrieval systems.
What would be helpful, I suggest (and if Prof. Wilson doesn't mind a "backward glance" once more), is for him to tell us a bit of what's included in the 1964 course, such as reading topics. I am sure to learn form it.
Dear CRISTAL-ED: What a great idea this forum is and too exciting to stay out of any longer.
The organization of information clearly remains central to the discipline (which will always be 'emerging' because of the diffuseness of the knowledge base and the diversity of the stakeholders) of information management. As an educator of Professor Tom Wilson's vintage, I suggest that one of the advantages to be derived from the past thirty years is the body of excellent research and writing that now is available to underpin the teaching of 'organization of information'. This is of course a topic far wider than library cataloguing and classification systems. There is every need for aspiring information managers to be aware of what has been achieved in these specialties and particularly of the role of standards. Maybe, in a time when most of our graduates will go through life without producing an important piece of original descriptive cataloguing or allocating a single Dewey or LC number de novo, most important of all is the history which library cataloguing and classification presents of internationalism and global cooperation long before such phenomena appeared even in the rhetoric of public policy let alone in the professions/businesses based on the newer information technologies.
Here at SILAS we are busy implementing a new Master of Information Management curriculum in which 'organization of knowledge' is the title of one of the core subjects for students specializing in librarianship. The focus of this subject is in fact bibliographic. What the current cristal-ed discussion on this aspect of core has brought home to me is how much of our whole curriculum here in both archives/records and librarianship could be described under the general heading of organization of information. There is throughout considerable emphasis on different aspects of information design and in particular on interface designing the online/on-disk environment. This emphasis is not only at the technical level, but on the deeper philosophical, historical and empirical levels wherein are sought the characteristics of information services in general and of client-centered information services in particular.
In these delvings it is great to have soundly based literature to turn to. In the foundation studies for a subject which I am teaching for the first time, entitled 'Organizational context and information seeking behavior' it is great to be able to turn to readings such as Michael Buckland's 'Information as thing' JASIS V42NO5 (1991)351-360, and Howard White, Marcia Bates and Patrick Wilson's For information specialists (Norwood NJ: Ablex 1992), especially White's 'External memory' and Bates's 'Berrypicking'. It is also challenging to try to marry the insights and techniques accumulated in thirty years of study of 'user needs' in the library/information studies environment with those accumulated in 'requirements engineering' and human computer interaction studies in computer science/IT.
So I guess that I am plumping for organization of information ((an inclusive term which I see in the Buckland light to include 1) information as process, 2)information as knowledge and 3) information as thing)) as the core of the core of studies to prepare librarians, archivists,records managers, and information managers generally, in whatever sector or for whatever groups they strive to create, manage and maintain relevant information services.
Thirty years ago I think that such synthesis was much harder to achieve - it's still a great challenge today - but it seems to me our principal hope of getting our disparate and lumpy disciplinary base firm enough to form an intellectual platform from which to launch at least a goodly proportion of the star information professionals of the C21.
Thanks UMich for making us all think! Carmel Maguire
On behalf of the almost one thousand current CRISTAL-ED listserv subscribers, I would like to welcome VISIONS listserv subscribers to CRISTAL-ED and invite you to take part in our discussion.
Let me give you a brief background on the Kellogg CRISTAL-ED Project and review past, present, and future discussion topics. (Current CRISTAL-ED listserv members may find the rest of this message redundant.)
With the assistance of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the School of Information and Library Studies (SILS) at the University of Michigan has embarked on the Kellogg Coalition on Reinventing Information Science, Technology, and Library Education (CRISTAL-ED), a five-year project to reinvent such education to meet the changing needs of information professionals.
To garner a wide range of opinions, exchange ideas, and learn from others involved in comparable activities, SILS began the moderated CRISTAL-ED listserv named on Friday, January 20, 1995. Discussion has focused on the following four topics:
Please remember the image of the Roman burning of Library at Alexandria which had been assembled by Egyptians to include texts from throughout the known world, and is suggested to have included items of value to astronomers and physicians. It was a centralized library and there were few or no external copies of the information which was destroyed. As much as I enjoy the accessibility of Agricola, Medline, Science Citation Index and the on-line academic and national library indices, these are delicate and vulnerable, either by their very centricity and/or by reliance on cheap and reliable electricity, and funding!!!! I hope you include in your consideration both of organization and of technology, the ideas of useful redundancy and maintenance of "off-line" and dispersed reservoirs of data. With appreciation for the library services which have enhanced all our lives.
Sadly, although I've dug around in my "archives" (i.e., the jumble on the floor) for early records, all trace seems to have disappeared -- not surprisingly, since I've moved since then and stopped teaching in the area more than 20 years ago. However, my recollection is that we began with psychological aspects of concept formation -- Vygotsky, et al.; moved into the classificatory functions in humans and how they relate to behavior, especially language behavior; the social aspects of the organization of knowledge -- such as the role of scientific disciplines in this respect; we moved on to systematic representations of knowledge from Aristotle, through the Encyclopedists, to Dewey, Otlet and the UDC, Bliss and Ranganathan -- not so much in terms of formal schemes, but in terms of the underlying ideas; we then looked at indexing and its history and at its representation in what was the technology of the day -- punched card systems and optical coincidence cards -- and how denotation of this kind differs from classification and how thesauri attempt to put classification back in to the systems; and wound up with an examination of the then current research activities, especially that of the Classification Research Group. My memory may be failing me -- but it was something like that.
In digging around I stumbled over what is still an interesting read: "The intellectual foundations of library education", edited by Don R. Swanson (of the now defunct School at the University of Chicago). There are fascinating papers by Bob Hayes, Vladimir Slamecka & Mort Taube, and Douglas Foskett. It was published in 1964. Very humbling stuff for people, like me, trying to reinvent the curriculum! :-) Also humbling, in bringing home the fact that, really, we haven't come very far, are the Proceedings of the International Conference on Education for Scientific Information Work, London, 1967. (FID Publication 422) -- a meeting at which a much younger Tom Wilson presented a paper on the development of an undergraduate programme in the field that spelled out the following structure:
It's nice to have Carmel on-line -- g'day Carmel. Of course, you are right that
>much of our whole curriculum here in both archives/records and librarianship could be described under the general heading of organization of information. There is throughout considerable emphasis on different aspects of information design and in particular on interface designing the online/on-disk environment. This emphasis is not only at the technical level, but on the deeper philosophical, historical and empirical levels wherein are sought the characteristics of information services in general and of client-centered information services in particular.
I'd imagine that to be true not only of Sydney's courses, but also of most other places - hence my suggestion that a specific course on the Organization of Knowledge was required which looked at the stuff above. Everything else we do certainly has something to do with the organization of information.
>Thirty years ago I think that such synthesis was much harder to achieve -- it's still a great challenge today - but it seems to me our principal hope of getting our disparate and lumpy disciplinary base firm enough to form an intellectual platform from which to launch at least a goodly proportion of the star information professionals of the C21.
I'm not sure that it was so difficult 30 years ago -- there was a lot of enthusiasm around -- information retrieval was coming in and cat & class were going out, computers were beginning to make an impact -- there was a definite buzz.
Vlad Wielbut's question is a very interesting one -- curiously, the answer to the same question, that we have put to practitioners, is, 'Yes." Practitioners are calling for increased attention to the organization of knowledge, precisely because the Internet is such a mess -- they want the information they put on it to be effectively organized for retrieval and they want the structures of gopher menus, WWW pages, etc., to be based on an understanding of the fields to which they refer. So -- you won't be out of a job, Vlad, although you may not be practising your new skills in a library - you could even be providing such services to companies on a freelance basis.
Well -- it's 4.00 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon here and I've already spent the time I intended to devote to last week's paper mail to corresponding on this list -- I'd better try to recoup something.
Picking up with your string and robot analogy...suppose you didn't know you were looking for a red sweater, you just knew you wanted something warm and fuzzy. The robot is likely to bring you not only EVERY sweater in the house, but all the wool socks, leggings, wool vests, coats (including the children's and the dog's), blankets, gloves, wool hats, scarves, stuffed animals, the cat, the dog, the kids gerbils, etc. ... maybe even rugs and dust balls.
The need to browse among like things makes organizing information essential. For example, when I look at a university's "home page" on the WWW, I don't want to see every single thing they've put up...I maybe just want to see the photographs of the Civil War they scanned. If the home page is organized, i.e., someone has devised a system of naming things and embedded those names in tags, or descriptions, in the electronic information put up on the university's home page to distinguish between the different kinds of information there...I can go right to the Civil War photographs. Otherwise, I'd be paging through who know's how many items before I got to them.
Our school also has been looking at revising our core curriculum (I'm beginning to wonder who isn't!). Our faculty decided that we needed to identify competencies that we expected of every graduate of our program. If we could agree on those, then that should be our core. The following competencies fall in the realm of "organization of information." I believe that they include many of the ideas that have been given in this list (i.e., the need for fundamental underpinnings, the need for reality-based instruction, the need to go beyond just cataloging and classification while not leaving them out, etc.)
My private understanding of Information is: "an encoded message." It is neither a thing, nor everything. Things may contain information encoded in them, and it is probably safe to say that everything may provide some information. Yes, this definition does not distinguish between a poem and a mathematical equation, or between a painting by Canaletto and design on the wings of a certain species of butterfly, but I don't see a problem in this: it is just a way of creating a useful set. (Charcoal bricquet and Eiffel Tower are both OBJECTS, aren't they?)
Book is not information. Table is not information. But the printed pages in a book and the shape of a table carry certain messages waiting to be decoded. Once decoded, these messages become knowledge and may be encoded again, into different type of medium.
Information professionals, whose task is to collect, preserve, organize, and make information accessible, are not limited to only certain kind of information, but they are limited to information contained in certain types of media. They are interested in preserving messages encoded in fossils but they do not collect chunks of limestone, neither do they separate strings of DNA in order to preserve information carried by genes.
Therefore, the problem becomes reduced to determining which media are the domain of information professionals/librarians. The question remains: once we will have established this domain, will we be able to avoid confusion as to who these people (i.e. librarians) are? I think so. Ornithologist who collects bird feathers to preserve messages encoded in their shapes and colors is not a librarian, but when he sits down at his computer and carefully enters (re-encodes) information into his database, he is doing the work of a librarian. Most of us have to pull up our sleeves every now and then in order to unplug a sink but are we all plumbers?
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