• Catalog
• • Full Catalog
  • Course List
  • Seldom Taught Courses
  • Historical Courses
• Schedules
• MS Curriculum Guide
• Practicum Guide
• Registration Forms
• Academic Calendar

Seldom Taught Course Catalog

100 Level | 300 Level |400 Level | 500 Level

100-Level Courses
LIS199AT	Arts & Technology: Promises, Perils, and Challenges.
Credit	3 hours
Description
Prerequisites	Freshman standing.
LIS199B	Children, Literature and Culture
Credit	3 hours
Description	Have you ever wondered about the true story of the three little pigs, by A. Wolf? This course explores narrative and art in children's literature for age groups ranging from preschool listeners to young adult readers. This course examines literary and social values, issues of censorship, moral education versus aesthetic freedom, the impact of technology on printing and graphics, the economic patterns of publishing and distribution, cultural and social history reflected in children's books, the influence of popular culture and mass media, and children's responses to literature. Students will read fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and picture books, applying critical standards to examples of each genre. Requirements include a term paper and book critiques.
Prerequisites	Discovery Course. Open to Freshmen only.
LIS199CIT	Careers in Information Technology
Credit	1 hour
Description	In this course, we will explore careers in a wide range of information technology (IT), information systems (IS), and other information-related areas (such as information architecture, IT consulting, and applications of IT in specific disciplines such as humanities and museums). The class will include a series of presentations from information professionals, readings, class discussions, and a small number of short written assignments.
Prerequisites	Resident of Weston Hall (Weston Exploration students).
LIS199D	Scholarship and the Knowledge Cycle
Credit	3 hours
Description	This class is an introduction to the notion of scholarship and the role of the University. Within this context, we examine topics such as intellectual property, academic honesty, grading standards, research literature, standardized bibliographic styles, and the use of reference and research tools online and in the library. Throughout the semester we'll draw on examples of scholarship in engineering, the arts, humanities, and the physical, life, earth, and social sciences.
Prerequisites	Discovery Course. Open to Freshmen only.

300-Level Courses
LIS390KM	Knowledge Management
Credit	3 UG hours
Description	Offers students an understanding of knowledge management (KM) in organizations. The course will examine the ways in which organizations generate, organize, share and apply knowledge; how contemporary and emerging technologies can help organizations improve these activities; and the social factors that affect organizations' KM objectives. Students will work on real-world KM problems presented by representatives from Fortune 100 companies. Students need no prior experience either with technology or with organizational studies.
Prerequisites	Sohomore, junior or senior
LIS390MSI	Music & Sound as Information
Credit	3 UG hours
Description	The advent of multimedia computing has awakened interest in the representation, manipulation, and use of both music and sound as part of our everyday lives. This introductory course will examine the wide variety of methods used to create, record, represent, modify, and present music and sound information. Basic acoustics, major notation schemes, and formats such as streaming audio, mp3, WAV, and MIDI, are explored with an eye toward learning how music and sound fit into our information universe.
Skill	basic computer skills
Prerequisites	LIS 201 or LIS 202 and junior or senior standing, or permission of instructor.
LIS390PIO	Principles of Information Organization
Credit	3 UG hours
Description	An introduction to the principles of information organization and access, including indexing and cataloging, with examples of how these concepts are applied in different environments and formats. The course explores the information needs of various communities and how certain organizations provide access or services that meet these needs.
Prerequisites	Sophomore, junior or senior standing.
LIS390VGD	Video Game Design
Credit	3 UG hours
Description	This course will cover the process of game design and development. Students will beome part of a game design team to create a working video game using the Torque Engine by GarageGames. No experience with Torque is necessary, and students will draw upon their different backgrounds and skills to contribute to the game design process. Students will also learn about important current issues in game design, including accessibility for gamers with disabilities, and concerns regarding mature sexual and violent themes. Student will receive content and design support from game industry veterans and game companies.
Prerequisites	Sophomore, junior or senior standing
LIS390WBT	Web Based Training
Credit	3 UG hours
Description	In this online Web-based course, students will explore how business and educational institutions use the Internet to deliver innovative training and instruction. The course will address pedagogical, theoretical, practical, and other issues involved in Web-based instruction. Students will participate in synchronous activities such as lectures and chatroom discussions and asynchronous activities such as Webboard discussions and reading course-related material. Students also will have an opportunity to evaluate Web-based training modules and tutorials. This course is offered in a distance learning format. Classes do not take place on campus, but instead through the Internet.
Skill	Basic computer skills -- this is an online course
Prerequisites	Sophomores, juniors, seniors

400-Level Courses
LIS450TKR	Topics in Knowledge Representation [now 590 TKR]
Credit	1 unit
Description	A seminar exploring logic-based techniques for representing knowledge, focusing particularly on issues in the application of these techniques to research problems in the foundation of information science. Specific topics include logic and ontology; semantics; logics for representing belief and action; logics for events and situations; and logics for causation and empirical reasoning. Particular attention will be given to philosophical problems and to the history of Knowledge Representation. There are no prerequisites as the necessary logic background will be presented as part of the course, but students should have an antecedent interest in these topics and be prepared to make routine use of symbolic languages.
Prerequisites	PhD student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS490GK	Technology-Supported Inquiry Environments for Learning and Teaching
Credit	3 UG hours [Section GKU]; 2 or 4 GR hours [Section GKG]
Description	The seminar is for students who are interested in the use of computer-based modeling, scientific visualization, and informatics to support inquiry in science and mathematics education. The sessions will include guest lectures from education faculty as well as faculty in the sciences, mathematics, engineering, and technology disciplines; computer-based activities; and discussions on readings. As part of the seminar, students will receive training in technology-supported inquiry environments, such as Inquiry Page (http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu), as well as opportunities to collaborate with each other and interested teachers on projects.
Prerequisites	Junior, senior or graduate student standing.
LIS490GL	Games, Information & Learning
Credit	3 UG hours [Section GLU]; 4 GR hours [Section GLG]
Description	Electronic games (Egames) impact entertainment, education, commerce, design, scientific innovation, and policy, globally. This course analyzes how games work as arenas for information, learning, social interaction, innovation, and expression. Major topics include 1) game technologies and infrastructure; 2) game-oriented engagement processes and participation; 3) information structuring and presentation; 4) games as communities and "third spaces"; 5) learning and games; 6) issues of ethics, privacy, trust, credibility, social control. Course format includes readings, lectures, group projects, and visitors. The intended audience is information professionals, designers, librarians, and educators who want to explore how Egames can help structure learning and information practices. For more information, see http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~gasser/courses/gil/gil-long.html
Prerequisites	Junior or senior standing. The 201 or 202 prerequisite is waived for this course.
LIS490LI	Legal and Ethical Information Issues
Credit	3 UG hours [LIU]; 4 GR hours [LIG]
Description	Considers legal issues such as privacy, copyright, intellectual and academic freedom, and censorship, from the U.S. and an international perspective. Ethical situations covered include the distribution, use, and possession of information that might harm others. This class is for undergraduates and beginning graduate students who are interested in learning about such issues as they apply to a wide variety of social and cultural contexts.
Prerequisites	Junior or senior standing.
LIS490MI	Museum Informatics
Credit	3 UG hours [MIU]; 4 GR hours [MIG]
Description	Covers information organization and access in museums, exploring the relationship between information technology and modern museum environments. Students learn about classification systems for museums, computer systems for information storage and retrieval, universal access to shared electronic data, copyright in the digital world, virtual museums, interactive exhibits, and information management in museums, through lectures, computer-based activities, and interactive discussions. The final project involves design of an electronic portfolio of virtual museum resources. Students are encouraged to approach class topics from their individual backgrounds in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences. There will be additional assignments required of graduate students.
Prerequisites	Junior, senior or graduate student standing.
LIS490SE	Search Engines & Inf Retrv Sys [Search Engines and Information Retrieval Systems]
Credit	3 UG hours [Section SEU]; 4 GR hours [Section SEG]
Description	This introductory course examines how search engines and other information retrieval systems are put together. By understanding what makes these fascinating systems "tick," students will be in a position to make better use of these important tools. This course will look at present and future search engines, both on and off the Internet, designed to retrieve a wide range of information types, including text, images, sound, and music.
Prerequisites	Junior, senior or graduate student.
LIS490W2A	Web Structures & Info Arch [Web Structures and Information Architecture]
Credit	3 UG hours [Section W2U]; 4 GR hours [Section W2G].
Description	This course builds on LIS 390 W1A (or W1B) to explore how Web structures have expanded from simple hypertexts and the informational implications of different Web-enabled activities. Topics covered include: Internet privacy, security/hacking, interactivity on Web pages, Web e-commerce, Web advertising and Web server logs. The course also expands on the issues of Web design introduced in W1A (or W1B). This course will include an introduction to scripting languages (no previous programming experience is assumed).
Prerequisites	LIS 390W1A or LIS 590LW, or consent of instructor.

500-Level Courses
LIS590AB	20th Cent Amer Best Sellers [20th Century American Best Sellers]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	Students in this course will use bestselling 20th-century American literature as a means of understanding publishing, bibliography, and popular culture in 20th-century America. Students will read best-selling novels and analyze the causes and components of their popularity. Supplementary reading will focus on the publishing industry and the profession of authorship in America. Students will choose a title from the bestsellers database at the beginning of the semester, read that book, and contribute into the database five assignments: a bibliographic description of a first edition, a publishing history, a reception history, a biographical sketch, and a critical essay. In addition, class members will read a number of other titles, and these will be the subject of a midterm and a final exam. The bestsellers database is at: http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/bestsellers/
Prerequisites
LIS590AHR	Critical Approaches to Historical Research
Credit	4 graduate hours
Description
Prerequisites	Ph.D. student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590ALI	Advanced Legal Issues
Credit	4 GR hours
Description
Prerequisites
LIS590AM	Advanced Records Management
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This course addresses the major issues and challenges facing the archival/records management professions in their quest to effectively manage electronic records. Students will study and evaluate the impact automation has had on archival theory and practice, and will analyze various models and strategies archivists have developed to manage electronic records.
Prerequisites	LIS 590RM or consent of instructor.
LIS590AMD	Agents for Dynamic Info Sys [Agents and Multi-Agents for Dynamic Information Systems]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	Provides a thorough introduction to Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AMAS)--a new, widely-used, and rapidly-growing paradigm for networked information systems. The material covers concepts of autonomy, agenthood, and multi-agency; models of coordination, interaction, teamwork, and negotiation among agents; organizational self-design and learning; matchmaking and brokering; case studies of applications in distributed information gathering/management, electronic commerce, human-computer interaction, collaboration support, CSCW, and others. Students who prefer writing and analysis will be able to investigate a broad range of AMAS issues. Students who are oriented toward experimentation will have the opportunity to design, build, and experiment with agents and multi-agent systems using a variety of testbeds and experimental tools. (Meets with CS 598 AMD.) [Elective course for the CAS in Digital Libraries concentration]
Prerequisites
LIS590CG	Competitive Intelligence and Government Regulations
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	An introduction to how corporations negotiate the competitive space created by government regulations and the implications for information professionals in the corporate sector. Topics covered include competitive intelligence, practices and sources, and the creation, dissemination, and modification of federal government regulations. Focus will be on the processes of corporate-government interaction and the role of the regulatory environment in shaping information strategy.
Prerequisites
LIS590CMC	Computer Mediated Comm [Computer Mediated Communication]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This course traces issues and research in computer-mediated communication (CMC) that have accompanied the use and acceptance of new electronic media and their support through the Internet. Selecting from literature from the many fields that examine CMC (including computer science, communications, information science, management, psychology, and sociology), the course discusses the impact of CMC and its use on individuals, groups, communities, and society.
Prerequisites	Doctoral student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590CTI	Competitive Intelligence
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	With the rapid proliferation of information communication technologies (ICTs), especially those that facilitate (positively and negatively) the transfer and management of information assets, an understanding of both competitive and strategic intelligence seems de rigeur. This course seeks to provide an overview of the principal theories of both competitive and strategic intelligence as well as methods for applying these theories to organizations that disseminate, manage, analyze, and/or archive information such as libraries, corporate information centers, dotcoms, and media or research firms. Furthermore, this course will introduce students to various organizational metaphors so that they can better understand which theories best apply to specific organizations and situations. Lastly, this course will teach students how to analyze an organization using the SWOT technique (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) in order to develop solutions that will make that organization more competitive, strategic, and less vulnerable in the short and near term.
Prerequisites
LIS590EI	Ethnography of Info Systems [Ethnography of Information Systems]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description
Prerequisites	Ph.D. student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590ET	Emerg Techs and Comm Info Sys [Emerging Technologies and Community Information Systems]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This course looks at current technologies used to build community information systems, reviews emerging technologies, and discusses how emerging technologies might fit into existing community information systems or how they might be used to build new community information systems. One emerging technology will be selected during the semester as a case study of the broader issues related to implementation of an emerging technology within an existing community information system or to create a new community information system.
Prerequisites	LIS 451 or LIS 454, or consent of instructor.
LIS590FCC	Federation of Community Colls [Federation of Community Collections]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	Examines future technologies and models for federating collections. Community collections are small specialized sources on a particular topic for a particular group. Such collections will form the great bulk of items on the Net in the future. Federating across such collections involves mapping similar objects across distributed collections to enable searching as a unified whole. A broad range of disciplines will be examined for different levels of federation, including schema integration in computer science, vocabulary switching in information science, cross-cultural universals in anthropology and psychology, cross-population lifestyles in healthcare and architecture. Students will read and present current papers from the research literature. A semester-long project will be required, which could lead to a PhD dissertation, involving design or implementation of new models or new systems.
Prerequisites	Doctoral student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590GI	Globalization & Info [Globalization and Information]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This seminar is an exploration of globalization. It will examine the emergent shift from a world organized around the political space of the nation-state to one organized around the informational, communicational and bio-political space of the whole planet. The focus of the course will be on how "the global" comes about, as information technologies, humans, nature, and discursive regimes are assembled in novel ways. Rather than using "globalization" as a description and explanation of our world, the course focuses on globalization as something to be explained. Readings will draw from scholarship on social studies of science, anthropology, sociology of finance, biosciences and information studies.
Prerequisites
LIS590HCP	History of Lib Srvs to Public [History of Library Services to the Public: Adaptation and Survival]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	The course focuses initially on the historical foundations of the public library in the US in the 1850s. It then examines the development in the public library of functions, administrative and organizational structures and services for increasingly differentiated social groups related to popular education, social welfare, creative leisure and political engagement. It places these developments against the background of the emerging professionalization of librarianship in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It asks what are the fundamental social roles that have sustained this unique social agency? What are the changing professional ideologies and adaptive mechanism related to these ideologies that have allowed the public library to maintain its identity and to continue successfully to provide library services to the public in the face of the enormous socio-cultural changes of the last 150 years?
Prerequisites
LIS590HPI	Hist Perspect Info Infrastruc [Seminar on Historical Perspectives on Information Infrastruc]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This seminar examines selective historical aspects of the development of information infrastructure, seeks to interrogate the idea of a modern "information revolution" created by digitization and the Web, and looks back to identify important beginnings and changes in the infrastructure that has been invented to help record, manage and mobilize information. Its themes are printing, bibliography, learned societies, libraries, and museums, and eventually (in passing) the non-print based mass media, and examines the social and technological contexts within which such infrastructural phenomena develop and change. Particular attention is paid to the nature and implications of a number speculative schemes of information organization and management. Its frames of reference are arbitrarily designated periods from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.
Prerequisites	PhD student; other graduate students are welcome to enroll (consent of instructor NOT required).
LIS590IRR	Inf Retrv & Natural Lang Proc [Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This doctoral seminar will survey different approaches to the design and evaluation of Information Extraction with Natural language Processing for different types of text data. Students may come to the seminar with particular data in mind, and can learn about relevant techniques for processing the data. Additional datasets from NLP research projects at UIUC and other universities will also be available. We will use a standards NLP and machine learning text but the focus of the seminar will be on practical application and evaluation. Students will run pilot studies with these data sets and will produce NSF style proposals for full implementations.
Prerequisites	PhD student; other graduate students may enroll with instructor's permission.
LIS590KRW	Document, Text, Work
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	Although these are foundational concepts in Library and Information Science, they remain mysterious and controversial. What exactly ARE documents, texts (editions), and works? Cataloguing practice gives practical answers for its practical problems, but this course goes further and takes up the underlying philosophical issues that still do not have accepted answers: How is it that multiple physical documents can carry the same text, and multiple texts can carry the same work? What changes in a document can alter the text it carries? What changes in a text alter the work the text carries? Are abstract things like works as real as concrete things like documents? If works are real, but not physical, WHERE are they? In your head? But if they are in your head how can you and I study the SAME work? Are works in some sense socially constructed? Are texts? Are documents? We will read and discuss classic papers from theorists in several quite different fields as well as draw on related work in linguistics, philosophy, and semiotics. This seminar is primarily oriented at advanced students or students with an antecedent interest in the topic.
Prerequisites	LIS 501 or permission of instructor. Master's students should contact instructor before enrolling.
LIS590MIH	Informatics & Healthcare [Informatics and Healthcare Infrastructure]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	Healthcare is the largest industry in the country, but the current infrastructure for providing healthcare is not viable. Recent advances in information technology promise radically different infrastructure that could provide a viable model for providing healthcare. This course will examine healthcare infrastructure through lectures and discussions, through text readings and web sites. Medical informatics will be dissected in detail: past (classification and retrieval of medical literature and medical records), present (health portals on the Internet becoming integrated delivery systems), future (cohort matching across population databases generated from health monitors). There are no pre-requisites for this course. It is intended to be suitable for MS students who wish an introduction to current issues in healthcare information. Practical topics will be emphasized with the aim of examining an industry in transition. A semester project will be required, involving the development of healthcare collections with health status questions and health treatment brochures.
Prerequisites
LIS590PI	Personal Information Mgmt [Personal Information Management]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	How do individuals interact with the complicated streams of information directed at them and flowing from them? What theoretical constructs have been developed to model these interactions? What practical techniques are used to help people deal with their information? This course will address these question through the lens of personal information management (PIM), an emerging area of inquiry. In addition to reviewing the research literature around PIM, students will create prototypes of solutions that they design to address a specific problem faced by individuals in managing their information.
Prerequisites	Prior completion of LIS 452 or LIS 590LW recommended but not required.
LIS590PPL	Public Pedagogies & Learning
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This course will explore education in public institutions including both an historical/foundational approach as well as examining the current status of education within public institutions. Seeks to review the major intellectual strands that inform, or at least underlie, the study of public educational institutions. Public educational institutions include conventional physical museums along with similar educational institutions, broadly defined, including archives, and libraries and the course will consider how the history of ideas about education and about learning in public institutions are directed by various learning theories. Explores the impetus and intent, the language and conceptual frameworks behind major work on the topics constituting educational theory, all with an eye to assisting the formation of the student's own understanding of theory and its implication in institutions such as museums, archives, libraries, and art galleries. The goal is to gain a greater sense of the theory that forms the impetus of public educational institutions. [Meets with CI 590 PPL (Curriculum & Instruction)]
Prerequisites	Doctoral student.
LIS590RC	Research Methods Text Corpora [Research Methods for Text Corpora]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	Covers data processing and analysis methods for large collections of texts, and their roles in advancing and testing scientific claims. Topics include collocation analysis, authorship attribution, clustering, stylometry, information theory, and hidden Markov models. Students will be expected to obtain access to a corpus of texts for analysis in projects and exercises. Students must come prepared to obtain or build their own information processing tools, and so prior programming experience will be helpful. The working environment will include standard Unix utilities, programming languages, and numerical/statistical computation packages. However, we will not have time for extensive instruction in their use, and students are free to use other tools if they choose.
Skill	Understanding of elementary descriptive and inferential statistics.Prior programming experience helpful.
Prerequisites	PhD student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590RGI	Race, Gender, and Information Technology
Credit	4 GR hours
Description
Prerequisites	Ph.D. student; other graduate student may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590RGS	Race Gender Sexuality Inf Prof [Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Information Professions]
Credit	2 or 4 GR hours
Description	This course examines how issues of race, gender and sexuality are represented in the information professions and will study how race, gender and sexuality affect, and are affected by, information technologies. Socially constructed (mis)representations (or lack of representations) of race, gender and sexual identity will be critically examined in different settings as they intersect, overlap, and impact the information use, technology practices, and the design of information resources and services in the processes of creation, organization, and dissemination of information in LIS and related fields.
Prerequisites
LIS590RI	Reliability of Information and Information Systems
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	Examines social, technical, and organizational issues in the reliability and security of information and information systems, including 'normal' problems; how people define errors and mistakes; human adaptations and workarounds; explaining differentials in problem resolution; reliability problems as arenas for social integration, the sociotechnical value of unreliability, etc.
Prerequisites	PhD student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590RSA	Readers in 20th Cent So Africa [Readers at Crossroads in 20th Century South Africa]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This seminar will focus on reading culture in twentieth century South Africa. Six case studies will analyze the efforts by women's organizations, teachers, librarians, military leaders and prison censors to regulate reading, with an emphasis on the responses of readers. The Act of Union in 1910, the election victory of the Nationalist party in 1948, and the unbanning of political organizations and release of political prisoners in 1990 provide the key events around which reading regulation is examined. A major paper on a relevant theme will be required.
Prerequisites
LIS590SRM	Survey Research Methods
Credit	4 graduate hours
Description	Introduction to the methodology of surveys for students in library and information science. Topics to be covered include nature and scope of scientific research; explanation, theory, and causality; deriving testable hypotheses; operationalization and measurement; theory and methods of survey sampling; simple random, cluster, and stratified samples; construction of survey questionnaires; methods of data collection -- mail, telephone, and face-to-face interview surveys; coding, computer-entry, and cleaning of survey data; descriptive and inferential statistics; interpretation of survey findings; research proposal and report writing.
Prerequisites
LIS590TCP	Pioneers and Pioneering Works in LIS
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	In this seminar students will examine a selected body of work produced by a number of pioneering scholars, researchers and systems developers who helped shape both the direction of developments in, and thinking about, major aspects of LIS. Also to be considered is a number of single works that have captured and challenged the imaginations of those in the field, some having achieving a kind of iconic status, but which now need to be critically assessed in light of present and likely future developments. Students will be expected to prepare a substantial paper for possible inclusion in issue of LIBRARY TRENDS.
Prerequisites	LIS Ph.D. student; other graduate students may enroll with consent of instructor.
LIS590WRT	Writing in LIS [Writing in Library and Information Science]
Credit	4 GR hours
Description	This class is a hands-on workshop in the kinds of writing you are likely to be asked to produce in order to present your research in the library profession, and information sciences and services areas, in publishable form. It presents you with a range of types of writing in the social sciences and humanities, gives you a chance to improve your own writing, learn about forms of writing essential for the information professional, and become a skilled critic and consumer of relevant writing. It also includes a reflective component on the work of other students and authors within the library and information sciences field, broadly construed. The class has three components: the production and revision of pieces of writing; reflection/critique on the construction of arguments in writing by others and ourselves; and analysis of the process of writing across several genres.
Prerequisites