LIS520 Information Resources, Services and Collections Janes

Autumn 2011

Syllabus & Course Objectives | Topics & Calendar | Assignments | Administrative

Information has been around for a long time, in various forms and guises, recorded by all sorts of people for all sorts of purposes. It sometimes seems that the desire to tell our stories, to write it down, is in the genetic code, part of what makes us human. From simple beginnings scratching marks in wood and rock to the recent explosion of digital media, we distill our knowledge and our selves into tangible form, perhaps (we might hope) for all time.

Then comes the fun part--somebody might want to try to get at it. Professions that deal primarily with information and information objects (archivists, librarians, information brokers, and so on) have arisen in large part to facilitate the process of finding what others have left behind. They amass collections of those information resources and develop services to help people to identify and articulate their information needs, find potentially useful or interesting things, evaluate them, and use them. This course will focus on these aspects of the life cycle of information.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course, it is expected that students will:

• know the history and characteristics of recorded knowledge, important formats and genres, how they are evolving and changing, including the publishing and information industries
• have basic skills in identifying information needs, searching for information to satisfy those needs, presenting and formatting the results of those searches
• be able to evaluate resources for individual users and communities
• understand principles of developing and maintaining collections

Text

There is no textbook for this course.