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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
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.
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
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.
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.

500-Level Courses
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.)
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
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.
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).
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
LIS590RGI	Race, Gender, and Information Technology
Credit	4 GR hours
Description
Prerequisites	Ph.D. student; other graduate student may enroll with consent of instructor.
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