INF 384C, Spring 2010
| Date | Theme | Readings |
|---|---|---|
Week 1 |
Introduction to the course and the topic. What is information organization? What are systems for organizing information? |
Borges, 1962 Borges, 1964 Yoon, 2009 Rosenfeld and Morville (Ch. 5) |
Week 2 Reflective essay #1 due Monday, January 25, at noon |
Language, cognition, and categorization |
Reddy Lakoff (ch. 1-4) Winograd and Flores (ch. 5) |
Week 3 Reflective essay #2 due Monday, February 1, at noon
By Friday, February 5, via e-mail, submit an idea for the set of entities that you want to represent in your descriptive schema assignment.
|
Bowker and Star |
|
Week 4 Reflective essay #3 due Monday, February 8, at noon
|
Description, structure, and interpretation
|
Baxandall (introduction) White (Ch. 1) Clifford |
| Week 5 February 16 |
Entities (objects, resources) What kinds of things are we organizing? Documents, works, texts: when is an entity "almost the same" as something else?
Entities in the bibliographic universe: slides
|
Buckland Wilson (ch. 1) IFLA (Read about Group 1 entities only: pages 13-14, 17-24, 31-49) Optional Mimmo, et al Riva Carlyle and Fusco |
| Week 6 February 23 |
Attributes and values What are our dimensions for description?
|
Wilson (ch. 2) Hillman (sections 1, 3, 4 only) Gilliland |
Week 7 |
Control of values The equivalence relationship: when are two values functionally the same? Authority control: the power of the library catalog
Slides: controlled vocabularies
|
Furnas Taylor (ch. 8) Rosenfeld and Morville (ch. 9) |
Week 8 Descriptive schema assignment due
|
Subjects: a type of value of particular interest in information science Indexing (or classifying): specifying a document’s subject
|
Wilson (ch. 5) Taylor (ch. 9) Fidel ISO 5963-1985 Optional Hjorland (1992) |
| March 16 |
Spring break |
|
Week 9 By Friday, March 26, via e-mail, submit an idea for the subject you want to represent in your classification assignment. |
Subject languages (a set of values to control subject assignment) Classifications, thesauri, taxonomies, subject heading lists, oh my! Relationships between subject categories: hierarchical and associative How do we go about identifying the concepts to include in a classification? And what do we do when we find them?
Slides: subject language scope |
Ranganathan (ch. 1-5) Svenonius (ch. 8 and 9) Kwasnik Hjorland and Albrechtsen Beghtol |
Week 10 |
Faceted classification Classification with multiple parallel hierarchies; synthetic classes Slides: faceted classification
|
Hunter (ch. 1-5) Vickery (ch. A-M only) Yee, Swearingen, and Hearst Optional Broughton (Read pp. 67-83 only) |
| Week 11 April 6 |
Standards for implementation of organizational systems: element sets, rules for specifying elements, and encodings for formatting and packaging the elements. |
Elings and Waibel RDA draft (skim a few chapters) |
Week 12
Extra office hours on April 15 (3 to 5 p.m.), 16 ( 12 to 4 p.m.), and 19 (12 to 4 p.m.). Sign up for a 15-minute slot (not required but encouraged)
|
No class this week; Melanie out of town. No office hours April 12. Catch up and work on classification assignment. |
Optional interoperability readings Duval, et al Heery and Patel |
Week 13 Bring a draft of your classification assignment to class, for peer feedback sessions |
Universality or diversity as classification design principles | Rayward Furner |
Week 14 Subject classification due |
Social media and social classification: how can we best enable productive dialogue? |
Shirky chapters 2-5 plus epilogue 25-142; 293-321 |
Week 15 Final reflective essay due |
Summation: classification as a mode of seeing | Doty |