Assessing and organizing information to solve information problems by providing expertise, service and instruction

Librarianship involves collecting, organizing, preserving and disseminating information to those who need it. Librarians help their constituencies find and make use of information contained in a collection of various kinds, sizes and resources to support individual needs as well as an organization’s strategic goals. The public library is a place where the community can gather and connect with each other. It serves as a technology hub and an intellectual clearinghouse.

Library and information professionals organize and evaluate important documents and resources in businesses, non-profits, governmental agencies, web firms, and public/school libraries where data is essential to projects and decisions.

The iSchool has extensive experience in library research and practice and we work with a variety of organizations, libraries and industry to help them organize and utilize their information assets.

Applicability

The iSchool’s expertise and research in library sciences can assist organizations and their constituencies in the following ways:

• Developing programs and services for users
• Encouraging community members to connect with each other to share knowledge and resources
• Developing information classification systems that allow organizations to more easily find and use resources developed by their members
• Integrating search techniques for customer self-help systems
• Assessing an organization’s information assets, including physical and digital objects
• Helping employees locate archival and other resources crucial to their work
• Organizing artifacts relevant to an organization’s history and contribution to industry or society
• Creating user-needs based collections
• Assessing and evaluating materials for their usability, accessibility, licensing status, or for budgeting purposes
• Consulting on best practices in instruction and information dissemination/reference

Projects and Research

Collection Collaboration and Development
Connect New York, a consortia of 18 libraries and small liberal arts colleges in New York State, share a union catalog and are embarking on several collaborative collection development and management projects. One of them is an e-book pilot, which has two purposes: one is to test out patron-driven acquisitions, and the other is to work out licensing issues so that 18 libraries all have access to the same materials.

Search
New models for user searching behavior, design of information services, information resources, and evaluation and how to apply these models to search systems. Understanding how a customer uses search can make an organization’s product information more easily found.

Metadata
Understanding various metadata schemes and how to select the right one for the purpose at hand. For example, the use of social tagging systems may be the best way to organize and share information with others or allow that information to be more easily discovered by the general public.

Cataloging
Evaluation and use of online catalogs, foundations of descriptive cataloging principles and theory, conceptual modeling of documents.

Information Display
Organizing large volumes of information for display through multiple views to different audiences.