On May 25, 1995 the Regents of the University of California approved the creation of a new school at Berkeley known as the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS). The School's mission is to train professional information managers who can locate, organize, manipulate and present information. Detailed information about the School can be found at the SIMS Web site, located at < http://www.sims.berkeley.edu >.
As of October 1996, the School has designed a curriculum, begun recruiting faculty, and is accepting Masters and Doctoral student applicants for the Fall of 1997. We asked the School's dean, Hal Varian, to tell us about it.
It has often been observed that there has been an explosion in the availability of information. The problem most of us now face is not access to information, but rather its overabundance. The challenge is to winnow what is useful out of the vast amount of information available: to select, evaluate, describe, store, retrieve, manipulate and present relevant information.
The computer is the "information appliance" that makes dealing with such masses of information possible. Computers offer ways to store huge quantities of information, to search it, to retrieve potentially relevant information and to transmit it over vast distances virtually instantaneously.
But who will organize these electronic repositories? Who will maintain them? Who will provide the interfaces, training and support for users? Who will provide quality assurance and archiving? Clearly there is a need for expertise in managing information resources.
The Next-Generation Information Manager
There used to be a number of well-defined job titles involved in producing information. There were titles such as "author," "editor," "publisher," "printer," "distributor," "archiver," and so on. But these roles are all up for grabs in the digital world - authors are publishers, publishers are distributors, and no one is an archiver. In this time of transition, it is necessary to train professionals to manage all aspects of the production and distribution of information. Because of this we have organized our curriculum around the idea of an "information transaction."
During the first semester, the students will take three core courses based on the three components of an information transaction: the information source, the communication with the user, and the comprehension and use of the information.
Information organization and retrieval. This course will focus on how information is organized, and the standards, conventions and protocols for storing information in various formats. We will study principles of classification, indexing, taxonomy, categorization, cataloging, retrieval and archiving. We will also examine standard data structures and principles of database management, along with quality assurance techniques for information.
Communications and networking. This course will have both a technical and a social component. On the technical side, students will study computer networks, security and encryption, as well as publishing and communications tools. On the social side, the course will examine the social and economic infrastructure that supports information transactions, such as intellectual property law, privacy concerns, and ethical use of information.
Users and society. This course will focus on the cognitive and group approaches to information use. We will examine how information is used in society, and the economics of information. We also will investigate how user needs can be assessed, and how usability can be measured and evaluated. Finally, we will examine how information can be presented effectively, and how useful interfaces can be designed.
During the second semester students will take electives that examine some of these same topics in depth. They will also take a core course in "management," which, in this context, means studying the tools needed to make the information transactions work.
Management of information organization and systems. This course will study project planning and scheduling, process design, project management and coordination. It involves analysis of information needs, specification of system requirements, analysis of alternatives, and design of alternatives. We will provide an introduction to quantitative methods and tools for analysis and decision-making, as well as documentation management. The course will culminate in the design, implementation and evaluation of a group project.
During the summer, students will work as interns at a variety of organizations in the public and private sector. This will give them an opportunity to practice some of their newly learned skills in a real-world environment. It also gives the employers a chance to "try before they buy." The second year of the program will be devoted to more electives, and a culminating project involving the design and creation of an information system.
Continuing Education for the Information Professional
Much of the material that we intend to offer in the curriculum will be of interest to professionals currently working in the field. Thus, we will try to offer several short courses in topics such as information retrieval, security, scripting, marketing, etc., both to our own alumni and to others working as information managers.
It is important to recognize the division between "knowledge" and "skills." We think of "knowledge" as material that will be useful to the student throughout the course of their career. This material will be taught in conventional semester-length courses (although we do intend to make these courses much more hands-on than is often the case).
The "skills" courses are more ephemeral. These are things that everyone knows will be replaced by something different down the road. Last year there was a great demand for people who were skilled in the use of HTML; this year there are so many authoring tools available that HTML proficiency, per se, is not very useful. Java is the language of the month, but even now development tools like Java are coming out so rapidly that the skills in demand a few months ago are obsolete now. We think that "skills" courses in the regular curriculum should be offered in a form much like the continuing education course: short one- or two-day courses oriented around a specific topic. This means that content can be flexible and adjust rapidly to changing demands in the marketplace.
Focus on Jobs
Many of the skills necessary to be an effective information manager are skills that have been a traditional part of the library school curriculum. However, these skills have been taught in the context of particular social institutions such as public and academic libraries. We feel that the knowledge and skills in the SIMS curriculum will be of interest to a much broader set of employers.
SIMS graduates will be able to:
Design, develop and provide information services;
Organize information;
Measure and evaluate user needs and information seeking behavior;
Design, develop, manage and evaluate information systems.
Many of these systems will be computerized, but we view the technical skills as only one component of the necessary competencies. Understanding the cognitive, economic, legal and social background in which the information transactions take place is at least as important as the technology per se. A powerful computer system that no one uses is worthless - what is important is that the systems that are developed provide useful services to their users.
One difficulty we face is terminological. What we call "information managers" others have called "knowledge engineers," "cybrarians," "chief information officers," "database specialist," "information analysts," etc. We have tried to design a curriculum that will provide a common base of understanding about the tools and techniques necessary to work in any and all of these areas.
We think that it is likely that in the future "information management" courses will be as common as statistics courses. Just as statistical methods are taught in nearly every physical and social science subject, techniques for managing information will be a necessary part of the training for anyone who works in these areas. Furthermore, we deem it quite likely that information management will be relevant not only to the physical and social sciences, but also to the humanities. We intend to work with other units on campus to help them meet their information management needs.
In addition to the professional Masters program described above, SIMS will also maintain an active Ph.D. and research program. The precise shape of the program will depend on faculty interests, but it appears very likely that information organization and retrieval, economics of information, and intellectual property will be core areas since we currently have several faculty members who are noted experts in these areas.
Sidebar
Q&A with Hal Varian
Q: What kinds of undergraduate backgrounds do you expect students in this program to have? Does it matter?
A: The short answer is, it doesn't matter. Some of the best people in this area have come from humanities and social science backgrounds. On the other hand, the students we admit have to be comfortable working with technology - they'll be doing that not only in our program, but also in their jobs. We want them to have enough experience with technology before they come into SIMS that they know that this is something they want to do for the rest of their lives.
Q: Do you expect SIMS to serve as the model for a number of similar programs in the country? Are such programs destined to become commonplace in the next century?
A: I think that this will serve as a model, but not the model. Most of the programs that people are talking about are still very small and the field is very large. I think that information management programs will be pioneers in using distance learning. We'll have to, just to provide sufficient coverage of the subject!
Q: Right now you're concentrating on graduate education. Do you foresee the program eventually being adjusted downward to create major and concentration-areas for undergraduates?
A: This is a resource issue. Given the size of our faculty allotment and the size of our facilities, it would be very difficult to serve lots of undergraduates. We will be offering a few undergrad courses since there are lots of bright students here at Berkeley that we hope to lure into our Masters program.
Q: How is the idea of SIMS being perceived by other disciplines, such as computer science and business?
A: We're getting very positive reactions from both these units. The computer science department here at Berkeley is wonderful, but they have historically seen their core competency as being on the technical side of things. They recognize very clearly that there are a large number of human and societal issues raised by information technology and are happy that these are things that we are addressing. We're collaborating with CS on the NSF/NASA/ARPA Digital Library project with great success - in fact, the principal investigator of that project is a joint SIMS-CS appointment.
Business is also very interested in working with SIMS. I hold a joint appointment with the business school myself, and we are searching for another joint appointment this year. There is a huge amount of interest in information technology among both the MBA students and the alumni, and a lot of talk about "techno-MBA" degrees. The business school and engineering school currently have a "management of technology" program and we may do something like that down the road. Both business and economics have some great people in technology strategy, and we will certainly try to draw on those resources.
Q: What do you see as the future of librarianship? Do you expect it eventually to merge with or be subsumed by the kind of program you are now developing?
A: There are lots of components to librarianship that we will not be able to address, simply due to the size of our program. So I don't see us as turning out general-purpose librarians at least in the near future. Libraries will definitely want to hire the people we will turn out - the problem will come in affording them, since they will have to compete with many other employers. Our students will have many of the traditional skills of librarians - the ability to organize and retrieve information, the ability to manage large information systems, and the ability to assist people in finding what they need. But in the future these skills will be in demand everywhere, not just in libraries. That's why I see a bright future for the School.
Hal Varian is dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California-Berkeley. hal@sims.berkeley.edu