Originally written for my UNT MS-LS ePortfolio, Fall 2025.
Competency Fulfillment
The fifth ALA Competency, Organization of Recorded Knowledge and Information, involves the understanding the concepts of organizing/representing recorded information, implementation of technical skills needed to organize information, maintaining, analyzing, creating, and applying various standards and structures to information and information discovery, and recognizing the impact of bias on collections and descriptors. I have fulfilled this competency with the fundamentals presented in INFO 5200: Information Organization. The coursework involved with INFO 5200 included an ongoing collection development project which was part of a process leveraging lectures and readings instill and utilize understanding a given userbase and user problems, as well as information object representations like entities and entity levels, metadata elements and semantics, records structure and specifications, and record content and input rules. More information was distilled and used to discern records structures and specifications, record content and input rules, and access and authority control. Additional aspects of the project instilled and applied concepts like information representation, which included subject access, thesaurus structure, classification scheme, and authority control.
In addition to the knowledge gleaned and applied in INFO 5200, INFO 5600: Information Access & Knowledge Inquiry imbued a thorough knowledge of information seeking behavior, and included in assigned system analyses, bias was thoroughly considered. Bias was investigated by the owner of the information resource, any other owners up the ladder, for example: Bing.com, owned by Microsoft, a publicly held corporation with specific individuals comprising the Board of Directors. Also considered for bias was region or nationality of the information provider, and how this bias may translate to information and how it is organized and represented.
Elements of other courses reinforced elements of this competency, such as INFO 5000’s discussion and assignment about the importance of the knowledge economy and how knowledge organization, or lack thereof, can impact organizations, digital content management via the Semantic Web which considers machine reasoning of semantic data and the future, and reinforcement of cultural intelligence and recognition of cultural bias.
Exemplification of Competency
The aforementioned INFO 5200 assignment, A Collection of Futuristic Science Fiction Literature: Information Organization System, is the clearest exemplification of this competency. In month-long increments, instructors provided us with detailed lectures and readings, supplementary assignments, and sections to complete for the final submission of the project. The first submission of the project reinforced my understanding of human information seeking behavior and organizing information in a sensible way to a would-be user. The next version of the assignment included considering entity levels, metadata elements and semantics, and establishing these elements in a helpful way for the user, which are involved in a four-step information seeking process: Finding information, identifying objects presented by a database query as appropriate, selecting specific objects to meet user needs, and obtaining the actual object for the user. The third iteration reinforced the concepts of access and authority control, representing information content in a record, and establishing a classification scheme. The final submission included application of knowledge from lectures and readings evaluate the system via SWOT and PEST analyses, which provide information for consideration for future iterations of the project. The process of completing this assignment enforced the key concepts of information and recorded knowledge organization.