A rough breakdown of design: The opening page of my pathfinder will contain photographs of the "fathers" of the field which will be mouse over links to the different aspects I plan to outline in my pathfinder. I haven't quite decided if the inside layer of the pathfinder which contains most of the content will be on one continuous page or multiple pages. Seems like it would work better as a a continuous outline. The choice of the photograph page is to mirror the design of my home page so that eventually my web site will be cohesive.
The main topics I am covering are History of Information Science, Usability, and Data Structuring/Information Architecture. I am debating if Information Architecture is an aspect of Data Structuring or a separate branch of the field. My interests lie with IA.
This pathfinder is intended for graduate students at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina. All resources mentioned can be found in UNC's library system or are readily available on the web. This pathfinder will focus on the portion of the curriculum which falls under the discipline of Information Science. The intent of the pathfinder is to give an overview of the most important resources for understanding the development of the discipline as a whole. Further information will be provided about two main branches of the discipline usability and data structuring/information architecture. This is by no means comprehensive but is intended to set someone in the right direction and act as a cue to what should be remembered in studying the discipline.
People who have played key role in the development of information science:
Vannevar Bush in his article As We May Think is one of the first people to conceive of the future of information that we are currently a part of and is cited often.
Suzanne Briet opened up the idea of What is a Document? which has become a central point when working within the digital environment.
E. M. Rodgers theorized about the Diffusion of Innovations which describes how information is communicated. (For the complete text please refer to the print version. E. M. Rodgers Diffusion of Innovations.
Tim Burners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web.
Jakob Neilson is seen as one of the foremost authorities on usability though the information provided on his web site useit.com and various books that he has published.
Richard Saul Wurman was the first to use the phrase Information Architecture in his book Information Anxiety and then discussed it further in Information Anxiety2.
For more in depth information about the history of Information Science please consult these sources.
Historical Studies in Information Science (full citation to come later)
A History of Online Information Services (full citation to come later)
History of Information Science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48, no. 4 (April 1997): 285-379 and no. 9 (September 1997):773-842.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_8/
http://www.wcsu.edu/library/odlis.html
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/images/vannevar.gif
