Informatics Cognate: Information Science

BA in Informatics

An informatics major with a cognate in information science requires a total of 43 semester hours, 18 of them from courses primarily in Library and Information Science, with some from Communication Studies, Industrial Engineering, or Management Sciences.

A typical organization produces and accesses a wide variety of unstructured and semi-structured information. Examples of such information include reports, memos, emails, technical papers, and Web pages. The Information Science cognate is for students interested in specializing in the organization, management, preservation and access to collections of semi-structured information. The challenge is in being able to use appropriate methods for handling large, diverse and ubiquitous collections of such information. An informatics degree with an information science cognate can lead to careers such as chief information officer, competitive intelligence analyst, information broker, digital information specialist etc. It also provides good preparation for graduate work at UI (since Fall 2006, UI’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Informatics offers formal Master’s and PhD tracks in Information Science) and elsewhere (e.g., in various information science-related programs, some often called “I-Schools”).

One required introductory course:

At least 9 s.h. from the following:

At least 6 s.h. from the following list of course pairs (or a different pair approved by the student’s advisor):

Note: students are encouraged to work with an Informatics faculty advisor to develop and get approval for personalized cognate course sets. We expect to expand and refine this cognate's course set based on student goals and creation of new informatics-related cognate courses.

Last modified: July 24, 2007