Special Topics & New Courses: MLIS
View special topics and new courses being offered in other Information School programs:
Spring 2026
LIS 598 A: Black Archives
- 4 credits; Standard grading
- Online asynchronous
Builds student understanding of Black archival histories, institutions, and social practices – which include interrogating what it means to document, preserve, describe, and collect records of the African diasporic experience in the US and internationally. Students will be introduced to multidisciplinary views on record keeping and reflect critically on questions of community and transgenerational memory, ethics of care, politics of representation, archival silences, and speculative future-making.
LIS 598 B: Community Archives
- 4 credits; Standard grading
- In-person
Builds student understanding of and experience working with diverse communities on development of practical strategies for documenting their activities; managing, collecting, and preserving their records and other historical and cultural materials; and undertaking community-centric collaborative research. Students will reflect critically on questions about definition, community memory and recordkeeping practices, motivations, positionality and politics, voice, ethics, advocacy, funding and long-term sustainability, ownership, access and use, technological implementation, and collaborations.
LIS 598 D: Information Architecture
- 4 credits; Standard grading
- Online asynchronous
Introduces concepts and methods of information architecture in cultural heritage and corporate settings. Covers topics including content, navigation, and information modeling; evaluating existing architectures; the role of IA in library and corporate settings; IA as a socio-technical process; inclusive IA.
LIS 598 E: Library Collaboration and Partnership
- 4 credits; Standard grading
- Online asynchronous
Explores library collaboration to achieve goals, the dynamics and rationale for library-to-library collaboration, and ways libraries partner within communities and third parties for maximum impact. Focuses on public and academic libraries with broadly applicable principles and practices with special focus on inter-library collaboration.
Winter 2026
LIS 598 F: Search & Discovery
- 4 credits; Standard grading
- Online asynchronous
Search is at the heart of library and information science, dictating what information is made discoverable and how it is navigated. This course will investigate search & discovery and its many facets, from the technical challenges of searching petabytes of web archives to fundamental questions of who dictates what is made searchable and who has access. Accordingly, this course will adopt an interdisciplinary approach to search & discovery, drawing from fields including computer science, data science, critical information studies, science & technology studies, and cataloging. A particular emphasis will be placed on studying existing search & discovery systems for digital collections held by libraries, archives, and museums, as well as emerging trends within these institutions.
Students with coding experience are welcome to enroll in this course, but there are no coding prerequisites. For assignments and projects, students will have the option to build, evaluate, investigate, or imagine new search systems for digital collections using their preferred methodologies, whether coding, writing, designing, or implementing.
LIS 598 H: Black Information Futures
- 4 credits; Standard grading
- Online asynchronous
Using artist Alisha Wormsley’s contested billboard affirmation, “There are black people in the future" as its catalyst, this course will examine whether and how this declaration applies to the agency and authorship of Black people in the information future given the histories of inequitable access to information and information-meting institutions such as schools and libraries, and to the freedom to read and write, more generally. Using various historical periods, movements, theories, events, and phenomena as frames including antebellum slavery; the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements; Brown v. Board of Education; the McCarthy Era; the rise of mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline; Afrofuturism; Hurricane Katrina; the impact of climate change on Black geographies; the advent and ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence; and the current wave of censorship targeting queer and Black voices and lived experiences, this course seeks to uncover what we can learn about how information has been and might be used to create and compound bias, prejudice, racialization, racism, and redlining or conversely, to inform Black liberation and survival strategies.
This course is designed for those generally interested in futurist thinking, critical histories of libraries, Black studies, intellectual freedom, digital disparity, and the intersections of race and technology; and for those seeking to build specific practical and theoretical knowledge bases for Black and Ethnic Studies librarianship; cultural heritage and memory work; and information policy.
LIS 598 J: Qualitative and Design Methods for Data Science
- 4 credits; Standard grading
- Offered jointly with IMT 598 A
- In-person
Data science students are introduced to qualitative and design methods to support human-centered perspectives, heighten awareness of discriminatory practices, and make connections between identity and data. Readings and hands-on activities provide students with novel tools for better understanding the ways in which people are defined and represented through data practices.
Autumn 2025
LIS 598 A: Archival Arrangement, Description, and Metadata
- Instructor: Joseph T. Tennis
- 3 credits; standard grading
This course will look specifically at the research and standard practice of describing archival records for catalogues and finding aids. It will address the differences between archival description and descriptive work done in LIS, introduce students to descriptive standards and best practices, and the basic technological context of contemporary description.