University of California, Berkeley School of Information
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The UC Berkeley School of Information or iSchool is a graduate school offering both a professional master's degree as well as a research-oriented PhD degree. Formerly known as the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), the School of Information sits on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
The program is located in UC Berkeley's South Hall, near the campanile in the center of the UC Berkeley campus. Its current dean is AnnaLee Saxenian. Most courses offered by the school are on the graduate level, with few official courses for undergraduates.
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[edit] Curriculum
[edit] Master's program
The master's program is a 48 unit, two-year program designed to train students in the skills needed to succeed as information professionals. During the first year master's students are required to take courses in Information Organization and Retrieval, Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure, Social and Organizational Issues of Information, Information Law and Policy, and Analysis of Information Systems. During the second year master's students plan and execute, usually in small groups, final projects to obtain their degrees.
[edit] PhD program
The doctoral program is a research-oriented program in which the student chooses specific fields of specialization, prepares sufficiently in the literature and the research of those fields to pass written and oral examinations, and completes original research culminating in the written dissertation. The degree of Doctor of Philosophy is conferred in recognition of a candidate's grasp of a broad field of learning and distinguished accomplishment in that field through contribution of an original piece of research revealing high critical ability and powers of imagination and synthesis.
The School of Information is problem-centric rather than discipline-centric, which means that doctoral students often vary widely in their research methodologies while sharing an interest in a common set of problems. These problems, broadly defined, concern the question of how people become informed.
[edit] Faculty
- Yale Braunstein
- Michael Buckland (Emeritus)
- Coye Cheshire
- John Chuang
- Paul Duguid (Adjunct)
- Robert Glushko (Adjunct)
- Marti Hearst
- Ray Larson
- Peter Lyman (Emeritus)
- Clifford Lynch (Adjunct)
- Geoffrey Nunberg (Adjunct)
- Pamela Samuelson
- AnnaLee Saxenian
- Doug Tygar
- Nancy Van House
- Hal Varian
- Erik Wilde (Visiting)
[edit] South Hall
The School of Information is located in historic South Hall. Built in 1873, it is the oldest university building in California. South Hall is located in the heart of campus, near the Doe Library and the Campanile (also known as Sather Tower). It is known to have the smallest bear statue on the Berkeley campus[citation needed].
