Information Course Schedule Spring 2000

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. Image in woodcut and engraving as information and propaganda. The role of education in achieving literacy. The emergence of an African American press in the 19th century, tied to growing politcal support from the abolitionist press, is in striking contrast to the nearly invisible Native American voice confined to the reservation. San Francisco is a case study of the early emergence of a multicultural print and education environment, followed by restrictive laws, propaganda, and educational system that enforced cultural standardization and use of English. Printing technology tends toward centralization, standardization, and few participants, an environment that inhibits the voices of a multicultural, multilingual population. This course satisfies the American cultures requirement.

This course addresses concepts and methods of user experience research, from understanding and identifying needs, to evaluating concepts and designs, to assessing the usability of products and solutions. We emphasize methods of collecting and interpreting qualitative data about user activities, working both individually and in teams, and translating them into design decisions. Students gain hands-on practice with observation, interview, survey, focus groups, and expert review. Team activities and group work are required during class and for most assignments. Additional topics include research in enterprise, consulting, and startup organizations, lean/agile techniques, mobile research approaches, and strategies for communicating findings.

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.

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.

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

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: 206 or equivalent. 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.

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

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

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.

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.