Basic information

Instructor: Melanie Feinberg
Class location: SZB 468
Date and time: Thursdays, 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Instructor information

E-mail: feinberg@ischool.utexas.edu
Office: SZB 456
Office phone: 512-471-8487
Office hours: Thursday 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. (after class) or by appointment

The course catalog description of this class is as follows:

Introduction to general principles and features of organizing and providing access to information, including varieties and numbers of information-bearing objects, different traditions of practice, user concerns, metadata and metadata formats, document representation and description, subject access, and information system features and evaluation.

This course provides a conceptual introduction to the organization of information, concentrating on the core operations of describing, grouping, arranging, and relating objects. While the course will concentrate most heavily on the organization of documents, or bibliographic information, the objects most commonly organized in libraries and archives, we will not be unduly concerned with particular implementations for any specific institution. In other words, you will not learn traditional library cataloging and classification or archival arrangement in this class. You will, however, learn the principles that underly such systems.

Accordingly, the assignments for the course will focus on both conceptual understanding, through the writing of reflective essays, and on using that conceptual understanding to design mechanisms for organizing information. Note, however, that the course is focused on conceptual aspects of design, not technical ones; you will not learn implementation encodings (such as MARC for cataloging or RDF/XML for the Semantic Web) in this class.