• Core
• General Courses
• Seminars, Colloquia, Individual/Group Study
• Undergraduate Courses

Core

202. Information Organization and Retrieval (4)

Three hours of lecture per week. This course introduces the intellectual foundations of information organization and retrieval: conceptual modeling, semantic representation, vocabulary and metadata design, classification, and standardization, as well as information organization and retrieval practices, technology, and applications, including computational processes for analyzing information in both textual and non-textual formats. Students will learn how information organization and retrieval is carried out by professionals, authors, and users; by individuals in association with other individuals, and as part of the business processes in an enterprise and across enterprises. This is a required introductory course for MIMS Master's students, integrating perspectives and best practices from a wide range of disciplines.

203. Social and Organizational Issues of Information (4)

Three hours of lecture per week. The relationship between information and information systems, technology, practices, and artifacts on how people organize their work, interact, and understand experience. Individual, group, organizational, and societal issues in information production and use, information systems design and management, and information and communication technologies. Social science research methods for understanding information issues.

205. Information Law and Policy (2)

Two hours of lecture/discussion per week. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor required for non-majors. This course introduces students to the accident-prone intersection of information technology and law. Regulation, notably but not exclusively intellectual property laws, increasingly dictates both the development and use of new information technologies. As the global marketplace moves to an information economy, the stakes political, economic, and social become higher and the skirmishes at the border erupt into regulatory battles and full-scale information wars. The course introduces a number of important topics essential to the practice of any IT profession, including copyright and other forms of legal protection for databases, licensing of information, consumer protection, liability for insecure systems and defective information, privacy, and national and international information policy. Students will complete several short writing assignments and one long paper as part of the grade for this course.

206. Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure (4)

Three hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week. Prerequisites: An introductory programming course and consent of instructor for non-majors. Course must be completed for a letter grade to fulfill degree requirement. Technological foundations for computing and communications: computer architecture, operating systems, networking, middleware, security. Programming paradigms: object oriented-design, design and analysis of algorithms, data structures, formal languages. Distributed-system architectures and models, inter-process communications, concurrency, system performance.

207. Analysis of Information Systems (2)

Three hours of lecture per week for seven and one-half weeks. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor required for nonmajors. Systems and project management, focusing on the process of information systems analysis and design. Includes such topics as systems analysis, process analysis, cost and statistical analysis, accounting and budgeting, and planning. (Formerly 208A. Students will receive no credit for 207 after taking 208A.)

General Courses

209. Professional Skills Workshop (2)

One hour of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week. Course must be completed for a letter grade to fulfill degree requirement. Prerequisites: 202, 203, or consent of instructor. As information and information systems projects have become increasingly strategic, information workers at all levels and in all environments must demonstrate higher levels of professionalism, not only to perform their duties competently, but to remain competitive in the job market. This course, in conjunction with the SIMS final project, gives students insight into the source and best practice of professionalism, and gives students the chance to refine the essential skills in a simulated but realistic working environment.

210. The Information and Services Economy (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. An introduction to services science — a new, interdisciplinary field that combines social science, business, and engineering knowledge needed for organizations (private, public, or nonprofit) to succeed in the shift to the service and information-based economy. A survey of (1) the historical, economic, and theoretical foundations of the rise of the service economy, (2) the analysis and design of services, (3) the technology and implementation of services, and (4) the delivery of services.

211. Group and Organizational Approaches to Information System Use (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 203 or consent of instructor. The transmission and use of information within groups such as work groups and organizations. Information flows in organizations. Organizations as information processors. Collaboration. Computer assisted cooperative work. Influencing strategies. Adoption of innovation. The uses of information for coordination and communication within organizations.

212. Information in Society (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 203 or consent of instructor. The role of information and information technology in organizations and society. Topics include societal needs and demands, sociology of knowledge and science, diffusion of knowledge and technology, information seeking and use, information and culture, and technology and culture.

213. User Interface Design and Development (4)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 203 or consent of instructor. User interface design and human-computer interaction. Examination of alternative design. Tools and methods for design and development. Human computer interaction. Methods for measuring and evaluating interface quality.

214. Needs and Usability Assessment (3)

Prerequisites: 203 or consent of instructor. Concepts and methods of needs and usability assessment. Understanding users' needs and practices and translating them into design decisions. Topics include methods of identifying and describing user needs and requirements; user-centered design; user and task analysis; contextual design; heuristic evaluation; surveys, interviews, and focus groups; usability testing; naturalistic/ethnographic methods; managing usability in organizations; universal usability.

216. Computer-Mediated Communication (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Students will receive no credit for 216 after taking 290 section 12. This course covers the practical and theoretical issues associated with computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems (e.g., email, newsgroups, wikis, online games, etc.). We will focus on the analysis of CMC practices, the relationship between technology and behavior, and the design and implementation issues associated with constructing CMC systems. This course primarily takes a social scientific approach (including research from social psychology, economics, sociology, and communication).

218. Concepts of Information (3)

Three hours of lecture per week.
Prerequisites: Graduate standing.
As it's generally used, "information" is a collection of notions, rather than a single coherent concept. In this course, we'll examine conceptions of information based in information theory, philosophy, social science, economics, and history. Issues include: How compatible are these conceptions; can we talk about "information" in the abstract? What work do these various notions play in discussions of literacy, intellectual property, advertising, and the political process? And where does this leave "information studies" and "the information society"?

219. Privacy, Security, and Cryptography (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisite: 206 or consent of instructor. Policy and technical issues related to insuring the accuracy and privacy of information. Encoding and decoding techniques including public and private key encryption. Survey of security problems in networked information environment including viruses, worms, trojan horses, Internet address spoofing.

220. Management of Information Systems and Services (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Introduction to internal and external management issues and practices in information organizations. Internal issues: organizational behavior, organizational theory, personnel, budgeting, planning. External issues: organizational environments, politics, marketing, strategic planning, funding sources.

221. Information Policy (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. An examination of the nature of corporate, non-profit, and governmental information policy. The appropriate role of the government in production and dissemination of information, the tension between privacy and freedom of access to information. Issues of potential conflicts in values and priorities in information policy.

224. Strategic Computing and Communications Technology (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Factors strongly impacting the success of new computing and communications products and services (based on underlying technologies such as electronics and software) in commercial applications. Technology trends and limits, economics, standardization, intellectual property, government policy, and industrial organizations. Strategies to manage the design and marketing of successful products and services.

227. Studies in Regional Growth and Development (3)

Three hours of seminar per week. Prerequisites: City and Regional Planning 220 or consent of instructor. Intermediate to advanced course focusing on theory and empirical evidence for regional growth and development, using reading and discussion. Also listed as City and Regional Planning C227.

230. Economic Methods for Decision Making (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Using economic methods for management decisions. Understanding costs and pricing. Microeconomics of information and information organizations. Financial management.

231. Economics of Information (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. The measurement and analysis of the role information plays in the economy and of the resources devoted to production, distribution, and consumption of information. Economic analysis of the information industry. Macroeconomics of information.

235. Cyberlaw (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Introduction to legal issues in information management, antitrust, contract management, international law including intellectual property, trans-border data flow, privacy, libel, and constitutional rights.

237. Intellectual Property Law for the Information Industries (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. The philosophical, legal, historical, and economic analysis of the need for and uses of laws protecting intellectual property. Topics include: types of intellectual property (copyright, patent, trade secrecy), the interaction between law and technology, various approaches (including compulsory licensing), and the relationship between intellectual property and compatibility standards.

240. Principles of Information Retrieval (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 202 or consent of instructor. Theories and methods for searching and retrieval of text and bibliographic information. Analysis of relevance, utility. Statistical and linguistic methods for automatic indexing and classification. Boolean and probabilistic approaches to indexing, query formulation, and output ranking. Filtering methods. Measures of retrieval effectiveness and retrieval experimentation methodology.

242. XML Foundations (3)

Three hours of lecture. The Extensible Markup Language (XML), with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for metadata and information models, is the key enabling technology for information services and document-centric business models that use the Internet and its family of protocols. This course introduces XML syntax, transformations, schema languages, and the querying of XML databases. It balances conceptual topics with practical skills for designing, implementing, and handling conceptual models as XML schemas.

243. Document Engineering and Information Architecture (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 202: Information Organization and Retrieval. This course introduces the discipline of Document Engineering: specifying, designing, and deploying electronic documents and information repositories that enable document-centric applications. These applications include web services, virtual enterprises, information supply chains, single-source publishing, and syndication.

245. Organization of Information in Collections (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 202 or consent of instructor. Standards and practices for description and organization of bibliographic, textual, and nontextual collections. Design, selection, maintenance and evaluation of cataloging, classification, indexing and thesaurus systems for particular settings. Vocabulary control. Codes, formats and standards for data representation and transfer.

246. Multimedia Information (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 202, 203 or consent of instructor. Concepts and methods of design, management, creation, and evaluation of multimedia information systems. Theory and practice of digital media production, reception, organization, retrieval, and reuse. Review of applicable digital technology with special emphasis on digital video. Course will involve group projects in the design and development of digital media applications.

247. Information Visualization and Presentation (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 213, CS 160, or consent of instructor. The design and presentation of digital information. Use of graphics, animation, sound, visualization software, and hypermedia in presenting information to the user. Methods of presenting complex information to enhance comprehension and analysis. Incorporation of visualization techniques into human-computer interfaces.

250. Computer-Based Communications Systems and Networks (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 206 or consent of instructor Communications concepts, network architectures, data communication software and hardware, networks (e.g. LAN, wide), network protocols (e.g. TCP/IP), network management, distributed information systems. Policy and management implications of the technology.

256. Applied Natural Language Processing (3)

Students will receive no credit for 256 after receiving credit for 290 section 2. Prerequisites: 255, a computer science background, or equivalent. This course examines the state-of-the-art in applied Natural Language Processing (also known as content analysis and language engineering), with an emphasis on how well existing algorithms perform and how they can be used (or not) in applications. Topics include part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, text classification, information extraction, incorporation of lexicons and ontologies into text analysis, and question answering. Students will apply and extend existing software tools to text-processing problems.

257. Database Management (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Introduction to relational, hierarchical, network, and object oriented database management systems. Database design concepts, query languages for database applications (such as SQL), concurrency control, recovery techniques, database security. Issues in the management of databases. Use of report writers, application generators, high level interface generators.

258. Analysis and Design of Databases (3)

Advanced topics in information management, focusing on design of relational databases, querying, and normalization. New issues raised by the World Wide Web. Research projects on current topics in information technology. Also listed as Industrial Engin and Oper Research C215.

271A. Quantitative Research Methods for Information Systems and Management (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Quantitative methods for data collection and analysis. Research design. Conceptualization, operationalization, measurement. Modes of data collection, including experiments, survey research, observation. Sampling. Basics of data analysis.

271B. Quantitative Research Methods for Information Systems and Management (3)

Introduction to many different types of quantitative research methods, with an emphasis on linking quantitative statistical techniques to real-world research methods. Introductory and Intermediate topics include: defining research problems, theory testing, causal inference, probability and univariate statistics. Research design and methodology topics include: primary/secondary survey data analysis, experimental designs, and coding qualitative data for quantitative analysis. No prerequisites, though an introductory course in statistics is recommended.

272. Qualitative Research Methods for Information Systems and Management (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Theory and practice of naturalistic inquiry. Grounded theory. Ethnographic methods including interviews, focus groups, naturalistic observation. Case studies. Analysis of qualitative data. Issues of validity and generalizability in qualitative research.

280. Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Context, Strategies and Impacts (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. What role can information and communications technologies play in transforming lives in developing economies? This interdisciplinary course positions recent public and private sector initiatives in the context of postwar development theory and practice, and surveys methods of evaluating projects that either develop new technologies such as wireless communications and low-cost computing, or that apply new technologies to areas such as healthcare, government, microfinance, and literacy.

283. Information and Communications Technology for Development (3)

This seminar reviews current literature and debates regarding Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). This is an interdisciplinary and practice-oriented field that draws on insights from economics, sociology, engineering, computer science, management, public health, etc. Also listed as Energy and Resources Group C283.

285. Design of Library Services (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. The organization and administration of library services and their place in the institutions and communities they serve. Governance, collections, and buildings. Planning, organizing, innovation, staffing, budgeting, controlling. Technological change, digital libraries. Political and economic aspects.

Seminars, Colloquia, Individual/Group Study

290. Special Topics in Information (1-3)

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

290A. Special Topics in Information (1)

Course may be repeated for credit. One and one-half to two hours of lecture per week for eight weeks. Two hours of lecture per week for six weeks. Three hours of lecture per week for five weeks.

295. Doctoral Colloquium (1)

One hour lecture per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Ph.D. standing in the School of Information. Colloquia, discussion, and readings designed to introduce students to the range of interests of the school.

296A. Seminar (2-4)

Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content. May be offered as a two semester sequence.

297. Field Study in Information (1-4)

Course may be repeated for credit with consent of instructor. Regular consultation with faculty supervisor. Prerequisites: Must be enrolled in the School of Information Management and Systems and consent of instructor. Individual or group study of specific problems in information management and systems with emphasis on field projects and studies.

298. Directed Group Study (1-3)

Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Weekly group meetings. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Group projects on special topics in information management and systems.

298A. Directed Group Work on Final Project (2)

No credit will be given if 298 has been taken to fulfill final project requirement. Two hours of directed group study per week. Course must be taken for a letter grade to fulfill degree requirements. The final project is designed to integrate the skills and concepts learned during the Information School master's program and helps prepare students to compete in the job market. It provides experience in formulating and carrying out a sustained, coherent, and significant course of work resulting in a tangible work product; in project management, in presenting work in both written and oral form; and, when appropriate, in working in a multidisciplinary team. Projects may take the form of research papers or professionally-oriented applied work.

299. Individual Study (1-12)

Individual study of topics in information management and systems under faculty supervision.

602. Individual Study for Doctoral Students (1-5)

Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare themselves for the various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D. degree.

Undergraduate Courses

24. Freshman Seminar (1)

Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. One hour of seminar per week. The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small-seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in many campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester.

39. Freshman/Sophomore Seminar (2-3)

Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

84. Sophomore Seminar (1-2)

Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. One hour of seminar per week per unit for fifteen weeks. One and one half hours of seminar per week per unit for 10 weeks. Two hours of seminar per week per unit for eight weeks. Three hours of seminar per week per unit for five weeks. Sections 1-2 to be graded on a passed/not passed basis. Sections 3-4 to be graded on a letter-grade basis. Prerequisites: At discretion of instructor. Sophomore seminars are small interactive courses offered by faculty members in departments all across the campus. Sophomore seminars offer opportunity for close, regular intellectual contact between faculty members and students in the crucial second year. The topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 sophomores.

103. History of Information (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Upper level undergraduates. This course explores the history of information and associated technologies, uncovering why we think of ours as "the information age." We will select moments in the evolution of production, recording, and storage from the earliest writing systems to the world of Short Message Service (SMS) and blogs. In every instance, we'll be concerned with both what and when and how and why, and we'll keep returning to the question of technological determinism: how do technological developments affect society and vice-versa? Also listed as History C192, Mass Communications C103, and Cognitive Science C103.

141. Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business (2)

Two hours of lecture per week, one hour of discussion per week. Open to all undergraduate students and designed for those with little technical background. Web search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) are technologies which have enormous influence on how people find and think about information. In this course students will first gain an understanding of the basics of how search engines work, and then explore how search engine design impacts business and culture. Topics include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities.

142AC. Access to American Cultural Heritages (3)

Three hours of lecture per week. An introduction to issues in the preservation, description, and use of tangible forms of cultural heritage. Documentation, ownership, and control of access to cultural heritage resources in the U.S.A. Cultural groups, cultural identity, cultural policies, and cultural institutions (libraries, media, museums, schools, historic sites, etc.). This course satisfies the American cultures requirement.

146. Foundations of New Media (4)

Three hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week. Introduction to interdisciplinary study and design of New Media. Survey of theoretical and practical foundations of New Media including theory and history; analysis and reception; computational foundations; social implications; interaction, visual, physical, and narrative design. Instruction combines lectures and project-based learning using case studies from everyday technology (e.g., telephone, camera, web).

182AC. Print, Literacy, and Power in America to 1900 (3)

Three hours lecture per week. Focus on European Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, and in the western United States, Asian Americans and Chicano/Latinos. The course explores the nature of oral and print societies as found in the focus cultures to assess the impact of the dominant print culture on oral cultures. This course satisfies the American cultures requirement.

190. Special Topics in Information (3)

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

190. Web Architecture and Information Management (3)

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

198. Directed Group Study for Advanced Undergraduates (1)

Course may be repeated for credit. One to four hours of lecture per week. Meetings to be arranged. Must be taken on a passed/not passed basis.

199. Individual Study (1-4)

Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a basis. Individual study of topics in information management and systems under faculty supervision.