LIS 2000 Understanding Information
Fall 2005

LIS 2000: Understanding Information has been designed to give students in the MLIS program an overview of the major issues before the information professions, through reading, discussion and the composition of essays about key ideas and works. The course is divided into weekly modules, with each module including readings and discussion topics.

Weekly Online Discussions: Students are assigned to a discussion group for the term. Throughout the term, each student will participate twice a week in an asynchronous, online discussion of an assigned topic. (The online discussions will be conducted via the COMMUNICATION | GROUP PAGES area on CourseWeb.) In the first instance, the student posts a 250-word response to the assigned topic by noon on Wednesday of the week at issue. The second posting, which will due on Sunday of the following week, will be an individual response of 150-200 words to the postings of the other members of the discussion group to which the student has been assigned. The goal of the second posting is to identify and assess the key points that have emerged in the first round of discussions. (So, for example, in the week of September 4-11, which is the first week of such online discussions, students will post the first essay by Wednesday, September 7. The individual response to the postings of the other members of the discussion group will then be posted by noon on Sunday, September 11.)

Book Reviews: During the course of the term each student will read and review the following books, reports and/or articles, submitting a total of 5 reviews on or before the dates specified below:

1. September 22: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn;
2. October 13: Digital Libraries by William Arms; and Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker;
3. October 27: The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information by Bernardo Huberman; Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies by Ben Shneiderman; and The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid;
4. November 10: The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester; The Information Commons: a Public Policy Report by Nancy Kranich; Linked: the New Science of Networks by Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi; and ?Wikipedia,? from Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia.
5. December 8: The Anarchist in the Library, by Siva Vaidhyanathan; Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman; Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig; and The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig.

[Each of the books noted above may be purchased via Amazon Books. Digital Libraries is available as a HTML document and Free Culture is also available as PDF files under the BOOKS tab on CourseWeb and/or via anonymous ftp at mingus.exp.sis.pitt.edu.]

Each student is expected to write a review of each of the items listed above and submit the review on the date specified. The third, fourth, and fifth reviews should be 1500 words in length; the other reviews should 1000 words in length.

The reviews should be prepared as Microsoft Word documents, and then submitted via the DIGITAL DROPBOX. Please use your surname in the name of each file that you transmit through the DIGITAL DROPBOX, e.g., smith_assign1.doc, to be certain that the file is identified with you; also refrain from submitting files whose names includes spaces or are overly long. Microsoft Word's and/or Adobe Acrobat?s Comment feature will be used by the instructor in evaluating the materials submitted, and commented reviews will be returned via the DIGITAL DROPBOX and/or e-mail.

The reviews should be analytical, focusing critically on the principal ideas of the work at issue, as well as the intellectual and social context in which it has been set.

Virtual Discussions will be held once a week, on Monday evening, during the course of the term.  The first session will be held on September 5^th, beginning at 8 p.m., Eastern time.

The sessions will make use of the so-called "lightweight chat" software that is provided as part of CourseWeb under the COMMUNICATION | COLLABORATION tab. (The sessions conducted through the use of lightweight chat software require the presence of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) on the user?s computer. Windows XP and Macintosh OS X provide native support; for students lacking such support, JREs may be downloaded free of charge from Sun Microsystems or Apple Computers.) Also note that these sessions will be recorded and archived, so that they may be consulted later.

Virtual discussions will also entail the use of Gizmo, a VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephone service that may be used without charge by registered members. Students should register with the Gizmo Project and download the appropriate version of the Gizmo client software. Gizmo requires an Internet connection producing a local IP address, e.g., connections acquired via PPP, DSL, cable modem service, or Ethernet, a microphone, audio headset, or USB telephone, and/or speakers. The Gizmo registration process will result in the assignment of a Gizmo user name, and installation of the client software will enable users to acquire a SIP telephone number by dialing **. (See below.) Gizmo user names and SIP telephone numbers should then be posted to the Gizmo folder. The folder is located on CourseWeb under ORGANIZATIONS | DISCUSSION BOARD.

Course Requirements and Grading: Thirty-five percent of the grade for the course is based on the quality -- logical and literary -- of the contributions that a student makes to the weekly discussion topics. The reviews of books and reports represent, cumulatively, the other 65 percent of the final grade. The reviews will be evaluated primarily on the basis of the validity of the views offered, the logic of the underlying argument, and the quality of the writing. The main objective of each review is to identify the principal themes of the book, assess the extent to which those themes were developed and documented, and assign some value to the book in the context of the subject it addresses.

Student Responsibilities in any given week of the terms are as follows:

• Complete Readings: Weekly readings should be completed by Tuesday to prepare for the first posting to the Discussion List.
• First Posting by Wednesday at 12:00 noon: Prepare a 250-word (maximum) essay in response to the assigned topic/question(s) and post it to the Group Discussion List. The essay should be an objective response to the topic, based mainly on a critical evaluation of the reading(s) rather than a personal or emotional response to the question. Students may also use other sources in order to compare and contrast the issues. All essays should be edited carefully and proofread thoroughly before submission.
• Read All Posted Responses: Students should read the first posted responses to the Group Discussion List on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and, Saturday.
• Second Posting by Sunday at 12:00 noon: A second Group Discussion List response summarizing the key ideas and points of the first round of discussion should be submitted.

Weekly Discussion Topics

September 5-11: Historically, librarians have served as custodians of recorded knowledge and gatekeepers to information resources. To what extent has the rise of networked information services begun to change the roles that librarians play? What other factors, if any, are contributing to changes in the roles of librarians? What do the recent CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) reports, Access in the Future Tense, Emerging Visions for Access in the Twenty-first Century Library, and Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space suggest?

September 12-18: According to Donald Waters, "digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities." (See CLIR Issues, No.4, 1998.) Is this widely-quoted definition sufficient in its scope and detail? Does it effectively distinguish digital libraries from traditional libaries, as well as digital libraries from the hybrid operations that are prevalent today? How do we render the notion of ready and economic availabilty in specific and useful terms?

September 19-26: The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit initiative of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. The purpose of the Pew Internet & American Life Project is to "create and fund original, academic-quality research that explores the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life." In the process, a number of reports have been issued, including the Consumption of Information Goods and Services in the United States, America's Online Pursuits: The Changing Picture of Who's Online and What They Do, The Future of the Internet, Search Engine Users, and Teens and Technology, which were issued in November 2003,  December 2003, January 2005, and July 2005respectively. Your charge is to formulate a set of recommendations for public libraries based on the findings of the aforementioned reports.

September 27-October 2: For more than a decade, business and economics researchers have written and discussed the "productivity paradox." "We see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics," said economist Robert Solow. (See Paul A. David, "The Dynamo and the Computer: an Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox." The American Economic Review 80 (May 1990): 355; and Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble With Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), xi; See also, Chris Hare and Gary Geer, ?The Productivity Paradox: Implications for Libraries,? Paper presented at the 1997 ACRL National Conference, Nashville, Tennessee.) Despite the promises of computer companies and technology advocates, and the obvious ability of computers to perform an unimaginable number of calculations, many researchers believe that organizations investing large amounts of capital in computers and information technology are not seeing the expected payoff in productivity. Libraries have invested heavily in information technology, both in hardware and software, and in the cultivation of a professional identity as digital information specialists. To what extent and in what ways has information technology increased the productivity of libraries and librarians? Have the benefits been commensurate with the costs?

October 3-9: It has been suggested that one of the myths librarians have perpetuated is that monographic and serial literatures become obsolete and of lesser utility to users over time. Is the obsolescence of library materials and subject literatures a myth? True or false?

October 10-16: According to Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey, in their D-Lib article entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at...Digital Preservation":

Preservation of print materials is both a benign by-product of production and distribution modes, and a process of active decision-making and intervention. Preservation of digital materials will reflect a similar mix, although the dividing line between benign by-product and active decision-making remains to be drawn. But as the volume of information in digital form continues to expand rapidly, an issue emerges that will surely require active decision-making and intervention: what should be preserved?

..... The "save now, preserve later" strategy is feasible only through the unique characteristics of digital information, where the steady decline in storage cost makes it conceivable to save everything. The chief criticism of this approach is summarized by the adage "saving is not preserving"; there is considerable uncertainty concerning the extent to which preservation techniques can be applied retrospectively to digital materials that have resided untouched in storage for long periods of time.

The second strategy is selection: that is, determining from the outset which digital materials should be preserved and taking steps to curate them throughout their lifecycle. The choice of which materials to preserve is a difficult one, and will depend on a number of factors, including institutional mission, cultural preferences, economic practicality, and risk management policies. The question will also hinge on the digital medium's impact on the scholarly and cultural record...is an e-mail discussion list, for example, part of the scholarly record, and if so, should it be preserved with as much care as the contents of a peer-reviewed journal?

Selection is not just a "preserve or not preserve" issue. It also involves the level of desirable intervention for a particular set of digital materials. Is it necessary to go to the trouble and expense of preserving a digital object in its original form? Or is preservation of the intellectual content enough? This issue presents difficult choices, but in a world of scarce preservation resources, these choices must be confronted.

Given that digital preservation is expensive, funding is scarce, preservation responsibilities are diffused, and cost-effective business plans have been identified as a necessary condition for success -- see It's About Time: Research Challenges in Digital Archiving and Long-term Preservation, a 2002 report on the digital preservation preservation infrastructure sponsored by the National Science Foundation and The Library of Congress -- which strategy should be preferred, and why? Based on available evidence, what is the likelihood that any one of the strategies outlined by Lavoie and Dempsey will be carried out?

October 17-23: How has the World Wide Web influenced the way in which ideas, information, and knowledge are exchanged? What significant differences between traditional, print-based publishing and electronic publishing have been documented? How will the emergence of the Semantic Web alter the current state of affairs? For a point of reference, see The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google, by Terrence A. Brooks, from Information Research 9 (April 2004).

October 24-30: No discussion.

October 31-November 6: In the United States, the copyright law promotes the public good and protects the exclusive limited rights of copyright holders, in that order. If the copyright law fails to protect the rights of copyright holders adequately, how is the public good affected? Would it be better or worse if the United States adopted the standard for copyright protection in the rest of the industrialized world, whereby the primary purpose of such statutes is to protect the rights and interests of copyright holders?

November 7-13: The use of online information resources is growing rapidly. Responding to user demand, libraries have steadily been shifting the focus of their collection development to the acquisition and licensing of electronic content, much of it via consortia. Between 1993-2002, for example, the average percentage of acquisition dollars that Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries directed to electronic resources rose from 3% to 20%. In 2002, 110 ARL university libraries reported spending more than $171 million on electronic resources, and 48 ARL libraries reported another $20 million expended on their behalf through centrally funded consortia. Owing to these trends, it is widely agreed by producers and purchasers of information that the use of these resources should be measured in a more consistent way. Librarians want to understand better how the information they buy from a variety of sources is being used; publishers want to know how the information products they disseminate are being accessed. The questions are: What is the current state of e-metrics? What are the foremost challenges associated with measuring the use and derived value of digital information resources? And why are e-metrics critical to the future of digital libraries?

November 14-20: Broadly speaking, three mutually non-exclusive models specifically address the issue of expanding access to scholarly journals under the rubric of ?open access.? The models are: (1) to start up new open access journals; (2) to encourage authors to provide free access to self-maintained archives of previously published papers; and/or (3) to open up access to conventional, subscription-based journals. What are key issues underlying each of these models? How is each model, or some combination of three models, likely to effect traditional publishers and their subscribers?

November 21-27: No discussion.

November 28-December 4: In the information economy, libraries are consumers (and, collectively, consumers of significant impact). How do we calculate the economic value that libraries bring to the information economy as producers of service?

Textbooks

[May be purchased via Amazon]

*Indicates paperback edition

Arms, William. Digital Libraries. MIT Press, 2002. ISBN: 0262011808. Updated online version, 2003.

Baker, Nicholson. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Publisher: Vintage Books; ISBN: 0375726217.*

Barbasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: the New Science of Networks. Publisher: Plume; ISBN: 0452284392.*

Brown, John Seely, and Paul Daguid. The Social Life of Information. Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; ISBN: 1578517087.*

Huberman, Bernardo. The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information. Publisher: MIT Press; ISBN: 0262582252.*

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3^rd edition. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Publisher: Penguin Press; ISBN: 1594200068.

________. The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Publisher: Vintage Books; ISBN: 0375726446.*

Litman, Jessica. Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet. Publisher: Prometheus Books; ISBN: 1573928895.

Shneiderman, Ben. Leonardo?s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies.  MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 0262692996.*

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. Publisher: Basic Books; ISBN: 0465089844.

Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0192805762.*

Relevant Course Policies are as follows:

?      Assignments: All assignments must be submitted on the dates specified, unless specified otherwise by the instructor.


?      Class Participation: Students are required to participate in group discussions, as specified, and in the virtual classroom discussions.

?      G (Incomplete) - Grades: For this course, a G-Grade will be granted only with the permission of the instructor.

?      Academic Integrity: Students in this course will be expected to comply with University of Pittsburgh's Policy on Academic Integrity. Any student suspected of violating this obligation for any reason during the semester will be required to participate in the procedural process, initiated at the instructor level, as outlined in the University Guidelines on Academic Integrity. If it is determined that a student has violated the policy on academic integrity, he or she will fail the course.

?      Disabilities: If you have a disability that requires special testing accommodations or other classroom modifications, you need to notify both the instructor and the Disability Resources and Services no later than the 2nd week of the term. You may be asked to provide documentation of your disability to determine the appropriateness of accommodations. To notify Disability Resources and Services, call 648-7890 (Voice or TTD) to schedule an appointment. The Office is located in 216 William Pitt Union.

Blending

This version of LIS 2000 Understanding Information had been offered each summer exclusively for students in the FastTrack MLIS degree program until Summer 2005, when it included both on-campus and FastTrack students. This term, course participants will include once again on-campus and FastTrack students, most of whom will also be in the first term of study. On-campus and FastTrack students will have identical assignments, and all students will be evaluated in terms of the same performance criteria and expectations. The only ?difference? in the experiences of the students is that on-campus students will be expected to attend class meetings, whereas FastTrack students will be expected to participate in the virtual discussions that form an important part of the asynchronous learning experience.

Videography

Lectures and classroom discussions will be recorded and made available in edited form via links on CourseWeb. In order to view this material, students will need to install the latest version of Microsoft?s Windows Media Player.