Advanced Topics

After completing the Core Undergraduate Curriculum, learners can specialize in one or more advanced tracks depending on their professional and research goals:

• Archives, Records, and Special Collections Stewardship: Focuses on the appraisal, arrangement, description, physical conservation, and digital preservation of enduring institutional records and cultural heritage materials.
• Research Data Curation, Semantic Technologies, and Informetrics: Explores research data management lifecycles, knowledge graph construction, ontologies, bibliometric network analysis, and computational workflows for data librarians.
• Information Architecture, Discovery Systems, and Search UX: Concentrates on structuring digital information spaces, engineering faceted classification taxonomies, designing intuitive search interfaces, and applying ethnographic usability methods.
• Scholarly Communication, Critical Informatics, and Information Policy: Examines open science ecosystems, copyright and fair use doctrine, the political economy of academic publishing, algorithmic injustice, and state information policy.
• Specialized Librarianship and Critical Information Practice: Covers anti-oppressive instruction, culturally sustaining community services, health sciences informatics, and legal information research.

Archives, Records, and Special Collections Stewardship

This track covers the theoretical principles and practical workflows required to appraise, process, preserve, and provide long-term access to physical and born-digital archival records.

Archival Arrangement and Description: Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts (Society of American Archivists / Dennis Meissner) - The canonical manual on processing workflows, provenance, original order, and multi-level archival descriptive standards.

Archival Arrangement and Description: Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) (Society of American Archivists) - The official, open-access content standard governing the creation of finding aids and catalog records for archival collections.

Digital Preservation: Digital Preservation Handbook (Digital Preservation Coalition) - An authoritative, modular open guide detailing file format migrations, fixity checking, bitstream preservation, and OAIS repository design.

Records Management and Governance: NARA Records Management Training (US National Archives and Records Administration) - Free, structured self-paced training modules addressing retention scheduling, disposition authorization, and compliance workflows.

Records Management and Governance: Records and Information Management (ALA Neal-Schuman / Patricia C. Franks) - The comprehensive benchmark text covering information governance structures, electronic records management systems (ERMS), and legal risk mitigation.

Special Collections and Material Preservation: Preservation Leaflets (Northeast Document Conservation Center) - A rigorous open-access technical manual covering storage environments, paper conservation, disaster salvage, and physical reformatting.

Research Data Curation, Semantic Technologies, and Informetrics

This track addresses the stewardship of scientific data lifecycles, the construction of linked semantic data graphs, and quantitative evaluations of academic scholarship.

Research Data Management: Research Data Management and Sharing (Coursera / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill & University of Edinburgh) - A five-week open-audit course covering data management plans (DMPs), repository deposit requirements, metadata documentation, and data sharing ethics.

Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web Modeling: Knowledge Graphs - Foundations and Applications (openHPI / Prof. Dr. Harald Sack) - A comprehensive, video-based MOOC examining Resource Description Framework (RDF), SPARQL query construction, and OWL ontology engineering.

Bibliometrics and Scientometrics: Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis: From the Science Citation Index to Cybermetrics (Scarecrow Press / Nicola De Bellis) - The foundational monograph on mathematical citation models, journal impact metrics, h-index formulations, and author cocitation networks.

Bibliometrics and Scientometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (Leiden University / Diana Hicks et al.) - A foundational open framework outlining ten operational principles for the responsible, non-mechanistic evaluation of scientific performance.

Computational Data Librarianship: Library Carpentry Lessons (The Carpentries) - A hands-on, modular curriculum teaching librarians reproducible computational workflows using the Unix command line, OpenRefine, Git, and Python.

Information Architecture, Discovery Systems, and Search UX

This track explores the design, organization, and behavioral usability of digital systems, specialized discovery layers, and user search journeys.

Information Architecture and Taxonomy Engineering: Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond (O'Reilly Media / Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, & Jorge Arango) - The definitive guide to organizing digital collections, labeling systems, site topologies, and controlled taxonomies for complex websites.

Search User Interfaces and Faceted Navigation: Search User Interfaces (Cambridge University Press / Marti A. Hearst) - A seminal, freely accessible open textbook examining the cognitive models, layout dynamics, query reformulation patterns, and faceted filters that guide human interaction with search engines.

Library User Experience and Usability: User Experience in Libraries: Applying Ethnography and Human-Centred Design (Routledge / Andy Priestner & Matt Borg, eds.) - An applied volume detailing ethnographic field research, behavioral mapping, space auditing, and user-centered design methodologies in library environments.

Human-Information Interaction: Information Seeking in Electronic Environments (Cambridge University Press / Gary Marchionini) - An advanced theoretical work exploring exploratory search, mental modeling, interface affordances, and cognitive feedback loops in electronic retrieval systems.

Scholarly Communication, Critical Informatics, and Information Policy

This track examines the legal, political, and socio-technical forces governing global information flows, scholarly publishing systems, copyright, and algorithmic infrastructure.

Scholarly Communication and Open Access: Open Access (MIT Press / Peter Suber) - An open-access volume analyzing green and gold publishing models, open licensing, author rights retention, and the economic structure of scholarly distribution.

Copyright and Fair Use: CopyrightX (Harvard Law School & Berkman Klein Center / Prof. William Fisher) - A 12-week open lecture series and curriculum exploring statutory copyright, judicial fair use doctrine, licensing, and library reproduction exemptions under Section 108.

Copyright and Fair Use: Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions (ALA Editions / Kenneth D. Crews) - A practical legal manual examining fair use risk assessments, interlibrary loan guidelines, reserve systems, and institutional digital lending.

Critical Data Studies and Algorithmic Equity: Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press / Safiya Umoja Noble) - A critical investigation into commercial search engines, showing how algorithmic architectures and indexing biases perpetuate systemic social discrimination.

Critical Data Studies and Algorithmic Equity: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT Press / Geoffrey C. Bowker & Susan Leigh Star) - A foundational social science monograph analyzing how classification systems, categories, and descriptive standards exert invisible institutional power.

Information Policy and Digital Governance: Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (MIT Press / Sandra Braman) - A comprehensive theoretical treatise defining information policy regimes, telecommunications law, surveillance, and state informational power.

Specialized Librarianship and Critical Information Practice

This track investigates domain-specific information environments alongside critical pedagogy and community-centered service models.

Critical Librarianship and Culturally Sustaining Practice: Information Services to Diverse Populations: Developing Culturally Competent Library Professionals (Libraries Unlimited / Nicole A. Cooke) - A foundational framework for applying cultural humility, intersectionality, and anti-racist praxis to library outreach, collections, and service design.

Critical Library Pedagogy: Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook (ACRL / Nicole Pagowsky & Kelly McElroy, eds.) - A two-volume collection of theoretical essays and classroom lesson plans applying critical educational theory and social justice frameworks to information literacy instruction.

Health Sciences Informatics: Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice Training Course (National Library of Medicine) - A structured, free interactive course covering clinical question framing using PICO, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) mapping, and clinical search strategies.

Health Sciences Informatics: Introduction to Health Sciences Librarianship (Routledge / M. Sandra Wood, ed.) - A specialized textbook detailing clinical information environments, hospital library operations, biomedical collection management, and systematic review consulting.

Legal Information and Law Librarianship: Introduction to Law Librarianship (Pressbooks / Zanada Joyner & Cas Laskowski, eds.) - A peer-reviewed, open-access textbook examining primary and secondary legal sources, statutory and regulatory research paths, court records, and law library administration.