Mastering
nformation


The raw material of knowledge is data: facts, figures, words, images, sounds, ideas. To be useful, however, data must be organized and presented in a meaningful way. Such a collection of data becomes information, a product that can aid decision making, contribute to learning, support research, and even provide entertainment. Information is a commodity, an essential resource needed in business, government, education, science, medicine, law, the arts, and virtually every other field.

The information professions are the career areas directly concerned with making information a meaningful, useful commodity. Information professionals are found wherever some form of information is created, managed, or accessed. In their work, these professionals use skills drawn from two broad areas: services and systems.

Within information services, they manage information resources, and provide access to them through academic, school, and public libraries and specialized information resources for health care, business, law, and other fields. In information systems, they apply knowledge of computer and information systems to user needs, performing such functions as requirements modeling, interactive prototyping, user-computer interface design, database organization, applications programming, and testing and evaluation.

At Drexel, information systems and services are brought together under the broad term "Information Science and Technology." These studies are an applied multidisciplinary field focusing on the needs of the professional world and integrating library and information science, computer science, computer engineering, management and behavioral sciences, and technical communication.