LIS section of phd601_2

Paul Kantor

 

  1. Assignments for the LIS component. I would like for us, each week, to consider several papers together.  We do this in a kind of “seminar format” in which one group plays the role of the leader, and must be very well prepared about the papers.  If you are in the leader group, you should read all the papers for the week carefully, and do additional outside reading related to the one that you will be presenting.   If you are not in the “leader group” you should read all the papers and try to formulate one or two intelligent questions about the papers, which you will pose to the leaders during the discussion.  As always, honesty and courtesy must guide the discussion.

 

 

  1. Forming groups.  Group 1  if your birthday is in Jan Feb Mar Apr May June

2                                                                Jun Jul Aug Sep

3                                                                Oct Nov  Dec

 

  1. Guiding questions for Nov 18. Group 2 will lead the discussion.

 

Visiting faculty member. Prof. Tefko Saracevic from LIS will be visiting the class on Nov 18, to serve as a moderator, and to give you another perspective on the work of Information Science.

 

There are 3 papers. Please organize your team so that each of you is responsible for sharing the lead on one paper, and all of the papers are covered. and each of you is reasonably happy with your assignment.

 

158 Schamber, Eisenberg, Nilan.  Relevance is a key concept for evaluating effectiveness of libraries and systems at the point where the user meets the information.  Why is it important to define it clearly?  What kinds of definitions have been offered for measuring this concept.  What role do considerations of operationalization play in those definitions.  Could there be an information science without the concept of relevance?  What other disciplines have something to offer LIS as it struggles to clarify this central concept.

 

182 Weaver.  This is the first part of a book the rest of which was written by Claude Shannon, and which laid the foundations of the field of engineering called “Information Theory. That theory has grown to have profound implications in everyday life (for example, all the messages that you send on the Internet are encoded, at the physical level, using ideas developed in information theory.  It plays a role in improving encryption, and cell phone capacity, and storage of music online.  But the essay by Weaver seeks to extends those concepts to broader fields of human activity.  Here are some questions to answer.  Using the formula given by Weaver, how much information is conveyed if a message selects one of 8 equally likely alternatives? One of 16? One of 32?  Why doesn’t the “amount of information double, as the number of choices doubles?  “Amount of Information “ can be thought of as the “size of a label”. If you had a library with 1,000 books in it, and you wanted to give each one a unique label, how many characters would the label need if you used only numbers?  Suppose you could use numbers or letters, how many would it take?  Now, this kind of reasoning supports engineering development.  But for broader human applications we have to image that key concepts like “amount of information” and  “channel capacity” can be extended to human communication.  Suggest ways in which the digital library can be described in “mostly engineering language”.  When people use the World Wide Web, what is the balance between considerations of technology, and other more human considerations. Do people pay money for more well designed web sites with better “human usability”? Do they pay money for greater bandwidth using DSL or cable?  Discuss.

 

197 Ellis.  Now we are back in a more metaphysical realm. On the evidence in the text, did Ellis read Kuhn, or did he learn about Kuhn by reading Masterman?  What concrete achievements laid the foundation for the “physical paradigm”?  Were there corresponding concrete achievements of the “cognitive paradigm”?   Does Ellis confidently see the ineffectiveness of information science, on the basis of a purely paradigmatic analysis?  Would that be acceptable to scientists engaged with either paradigm?  Can you make an analogy between say information science, and the search for new materials for repairing decayed and broken teeth?   Why must the two parts of dentistry communicate? How do they in fact communicate?  What are the implications for Information Science? Some sciences (chemistry, physics) have evolved into a pair of coupled disciplines called experiment and theory. Generally theory proposes, and experiment disposes.  If information science were to work this way, which group would make the dispositive judgments about new models? Defend your answer].