LIS 5043 – Organization of Information and Knowledge Resources, June Abbas, Fall 2017
Course Goals:
- Acquire a comprehensive understanding of the principles, methodologies, and practices fundamental to information organization and knowledge resources
- Become familiar with issues, trends, and key people in information organization and knowledge representation
Learning and Skill Objectives:
- Understand the human, social, and policy issues inherent in organization of information and knowledge resources
- Describe the needs for and identification and organization of information and knowledge resources
- Analyze the need for organizing and representing information in a variety of institutional settings
- Analyze search tools, web sites, and other information/knowledge management products
- Describe, compare, and contrast major representation techniques, methods, and tools
- Evaluate several types of information packages and retrieval sources
LIS 5043 was beneficial in my overall understanding of organization concepts. The course, instructor, readings, and resources brought about awareness of various types of organization systems, their requirements, and their effectiveness. Perhaps, the most beneficial outcomes for me were the practice of evaluating systems and analyzing users. This will help me in becoming an effective school librarian as well as in providing leadership (Goal 1 and Goal 3). I was able to evaluate libraries’ online public access catalogs (OPAC), and other online systems of organizing (Goal 3.3).
The course was also beneficial to me in that I now better understand users and the importance of evaluating their needs. I now understand the differing levels of knowledge (domain, system, task, and world) and how these levels may affect a user population. This leads to a better understanding of attributes to represent in metadata and features that would benefit diverse users (Goal 1.2). The Organization System Project helped me to understand the need to identify and recognize users and their needs and develop an effective organization system. It also helped me to understand the importance of detailed systems and the effort into providing quality bibliographic records and information.
Furthermore, LIS 5043 expanded my knowledge of essential policies. It also helped me to better understand differing bibliographic records with assignments emphasizing MARC records. I was able to observe other records and view them from a user’s perspective. Again, this helped me to see the systems from a user point-of-view with knowledge on how catalogers would create the records.
The organization of information and knowledge resources is a vast and essential aspect to understanding library and information studies. LIS 5043 helped me to learn to evaluate existing systems as well as to create one using a user and creator point-of-view. It helped me to understand the importance of standards, requirements, information retrieval, and more. I will continue to use these skills as a librarian in the future.
This assignment allowed me to observe and compare two library online public access catalogs. This allowed me to view the systems from both a user’s point-of-view and from someone who had gained knowledge of cataloging through LIS 5043. I was able to notice beneficial features and helpful differences.
This project allowed me to create an organizational structure of a hypothetical collection of fairy tale books. It required me to think in-depth about the potential users of the system, their types and levels of knowledge, and the features they would likely need and desire. The project required detailed instructions of input rules and examples.
Maegan Heath 