Education for IS or IT. Is there a difference?

Abstract

The total number of UK information scientists with examined IS qualifications is estimated at 1300. Of these about two thirds trained at The City University. In a spectrum of jobs ranging from librarianship through IS to IT the proportion of non print information handled increases to 100% and is seen as an important differentiating characteristic for the three areas. The new part-time M.Sc. in Information Systems and Technology offered at The City University is envisaged as filling a gap between existing IS and IT courses.Education for information science started in January 1961 with evening courses organised by J. Farradane at the precursor of The City University (TCU). These were based on an Institute of Information Scientists' syllabus or set of criteria and led to the IIS Certificate [1]. Full time courses followed in 1964 and with the granting of a university Charter in 1966, TCU offered M.Sc. degrees from 1967. Since then, 465 M.Sc.s, over 200 part time Diplomas, and 22 research degrees have been awarded. By the end of the current year over 900 students will have been trained by TCU's Department of Information Science. This of course includes about 120 IIS Certificate students but excludes about 90 students who did not satisfactorily complete their course. Many former students are well known in the IIS, including Southern Branch

Generic elements in an undergraduate course in information study

“…how discipline specialists operate-inside and outside their discipline. 3 coding: applications of set and system theories, e.g. clustering, networking.…”

“…1.1(b). copying, reprography (3). There are several technologies, mostly treated generically within the large body of communications.…”

“…as basic to MMI), information biotechnology (see section 3.3). 3. S. InformaTIOn work, particular 3.…”

“…Now, courses in information science are traditionally offered to postgraduates who have sufficient educational resources to be able to separate educational from professional (and other) strands in these courses. However, attention is now moving to undergraduate courses [3,4,5]. Undergraduates cannot hope to separate these incompatible strands as long as information scientists are content to confound them.…”

“…As a result of such doubt and even diffidence, generated, albeit unintentionally, by the information profession, most peripheral areas of information and library work are decisively lost to such as management studies, operational research, marketing, psychology and -most notably and recently-computer science [25]. So Bottle is all too right when he says that &dquo;the corpus of knowledge is just not large enough to stretch even a moderate mind in the way being done by an honours degree in say chemistry, history or even pharmacology&dquo; [3]. The corpus of portable knowledge.…”