Course Schedule: Fall 1998

Three hours of lecture per week. The impact of information and information systems, technology, practices, and artifacts on how people organize their work, interact, and understand experience. Social issues in information systems design and management: assessing user needs, involving users in system design, and understanding human-computer interaction and computer-mediated work and communication. Use of law and other policies to mediate the tension between free flow and constriction of information.

Designing and managing effective information systems requires an understanding of the circumstances of their use: real people use them for specific purposes under specific circumstances. Information systems (computer-based and traditional) both shape and are shaped by their users and their context. In the first half of this course, we consider the social nature of information and information systems, and their design and use as part of how people make sense out of their worlds, interact with one another, and coordinate action across time and space. We consider such issues as the social construction of information; knowledge communities (including organizations) and the collaborative nature of knowledge; the self and community in an electronic world; assessing user needs; involving users in system design; and issues in human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work.

Designing and managing effective information systems also requires having a larger understanding of law and policy issues arising from the uses of information. Sometimes these laws, especially intellectual property laws, provide important sources of protection against unauthorized uses or appropriations of information. Sometimes, as with state privacy and federal encryption regulations, the law places limits on what uses can be made of information or what kinds of security systems can be used to protect information. Sometimes, codes of conduct within an industry also constrain the freedom of firms to do whatever they want with information. Because information law and policy is evolving at a fairly rapid pace in response to new technologies, it is important to have a sense of some of the larger information policy debates going on at national and international levels, such as those requiring libraries to filter content and those concerning privacy, because what is a policy debate now may turn out to be a regulation or a broader rule at a later time. As information becomes the principal commodity of the information economy, traditional "freedom of information" policies need to be adjusted.

This course is required of all entering SIMS students and serves as an introduction to other courses in the curriculum treating these issues in greater depth.

This course will introduce students to policy issues and analytical methods in the areas of information systems, communications, computing, and media. Economic, political, social, and legal perspectives will be introduced. The specific topics will vary from year to year and will reflect the current interests of the students and the instructor, but the following list should suggest the range of areas likely to be covered.

Possible Outline of Topics:

1. Background on Information Policy — Domestic
2. Background on Information Policy — International
3. Infrastructure Issues and Technological Change: The Case of NREN, the Internet, NGI, etc.
4. Ownership of Information: Property Rights
5. Intellectual Freedom
6. Access to Information
7. Public vs. Private Provision of Information
8. User Fees for Government-Provided Information
9. Information Markets
10. Privacy
11. Mass Media & Common Carriers
12. National Security
13. Standards, Elements of Industrial Policy
14. Trans-border data flows
15. Consumer information
16. Medical and health information

This course explores electronic publishing from a project-based framework. Students are expected to define and develop an electronic publishing project, which can be experimental in nature and should propose new directions. The course is as concerned with the design and development process as with the end product.

The students examine and adapt project development methodologies usually associated with software development, including Rapid Prototyping and Object-oriented Design. We emphasize building flexible, multi-purpose systems that are open to change and reuse. In addition, students evaluate the technology behind electronic publishing systems and become familiar with emerging trends in designing and building systems.

Students become familiar with various aspects of the publishing business and incorporate marketing, production, and distribution considerations into their project. Invited speakers cover topics in electronic publishing as well.

At the end of the course, each student has developed a detailed project plan and a working prototype for an electronic publishing project that includes at least two different products for the same audience. The student is required to exploit multiple technologies.

Students are expected to collaborate on projects, acting in the role as a leader of their own project and as a consultant to other projects. Students evaluate the contributions made to his or her project by other students.

The goal of the course is to have students become familiar with the business, creative, and technical challenges of electronic publishing by developing and managing a project.

The seminar explores selected advanced topics relating to 'digital libraries' with special emphasis on:

• Access to networked resources
• Use of two or more resources in conjunction
• Combined use of two or more retrieval systems (e.g. use of pre- or post-processing to enhance the capabilities)
• The redesign of library services

It is expected that these issues will require attention to a number of questions about the nature of information retrieval processes, the feasibility of not-yet-conventional techniques, techniques of making different systems work together, social impact, and the reconsideration of past practices. More generally, the seminar is intended to provide a forum for advanced students in the School. Anyone interested in these topics is welcome to join in -- and to talk about their own work. This is a continuation of the previous Lynch/Buckland seminars.

This is a research seminar focusing on current topics in information access. We study four or five main themes throughout the course of the semester. Each class meeting focuses around the discussion of one or more research papers. Most meetings begin with a discussion of background information (led by Prof. Hearst), followed by a discussion of the findings of the paper(s) (led by one or more students), following by general discussion relating these findings to what has already been discussed and to implications for new research.

Themes under consideration are:

• Integration of users' personal information within various information access tasks.
• Incorporation of AI-style knowledge structure into information access systems.
• Use of hyperlinks and collective user information in improving web structure.
• The relationship between pre-defined categories and automatically generated structure (like clusters) in information access interfaces.
• Supporting the dynamic process of information access in the user interface. Text data mining. Visualization of large text collections.
• Students' suggestions.

These options are discussed during the first class meeting.