Current Courses

551/751 Information Seeking Behavior (Syllabus)

Information seeking is a complex information and communication activity requiring access to diverse information systems and resources in order to deal with work-related, personal, and social information problems. This course provides students an introduction to the human aspects of systems and technology in various information contexts including work wettings, schools, health care, and everyday life. This course critically examines concepts, models and frameworks relevant to human information behavior across LIS, IR, and HCI. Understanding human information seeking behavior tends to be qualitative and inductive in nature. Therefore, students will have opportunities to learn various ethnographic research techniques including designing ethnographic interviews, conducting non-participant observation, and taking field notes. This course also offers hands-on training of qualitative data analysis using QSR NVivo software.

596 Practical Engagement Workshop: Digital Librarianship (Syllabus)

Digital librarianship (Practical Engagement Workshop course) will present an overview of digital librarianship with a focus on the Internet Public Library. We will use the IPL as a test bed for testing innovations in digital services in libraries. Students will prepare to become managers and practitioners of digital reference services by exploring information technologies for digital service provision, developing collections of resources in digital form, and discussing issues related to digital reference service design and maintenance.

531 Human Interaction in Information Retrieval

This course explores interactive retrieval systems from users' perspectives. The purpose of this course is to introduce theory, research, and practice related to current information retrieval systems in which humans control search processes and interact with information on various levels from interfaces to functionalities. Students will be encouraged to consider the nature of interaction with information in various information retrieval systems including experimental IR systems, Web-based operational IR systems, traditional document retrieval systems, multimedia retrieval systems, question answering systems, etc. Students will also learn about user studies in information retrieval in terms of experimental evaluations and measures and criteria for system performance.

Courses Taught Previously

501 Use of Information

"The Use of Information" engages students in the central professional and academic commitment of the School of Information: that better academic knowledge and better professional practice both rest on understanding the actual use of information in real world environments. This course introduces students to frameworks, methods, and issues on information use in various levels of aggregation (individual, group, organization, and profession) and various contexts (work environments, community, and society). Students will learn fundamental notions of information need, information behavior, and knowledge construction associated with designing information systems and services.

622 Evaluation of Systems and Services

This course provides students an introduction to evaluation of systems and services used to assess performance, functionality, usability, and designing issues in its context. Emphasis will be on the impact of systems and services to end-users. The students will have opportunities to learn both qualitative and quantitative research methods for data collection and analysis by examining and applying a variety of methodology to a product or a service of their own interests. The methods are taught through lectures, in-class exercises, readings, group or individual assignments. In a final presentation, various methods will be applied in a comprehensive way to provide overall results of evaluation for a product or service to a client.

© 2007 by Soo Young Rieh