Talk: Robert J. Glushko (UC Berkeley School of Information) on e-textbooks

This talk fits in well with our course:

*The Discipline of Organizing: A Collaborative E- Textbook Project for the Information Fields*

Friday April 5, 10-11 AM, SLIS Commons, HC White Hall

Bob Glushko will present his project to develop a multidisciplinary electronic and paper textbook titled "The Discipline of Organizing" to be published by MIT Press.  Glushko hopes it will also made available free to students online.  The textbook seeks to serve the information organization text needs of a variety of information intensive disciplines such as LIS, Business MIS and Informatics.

A project like "The Discipline of Organizing" implies a multidisciplinary collaboration to create it. It faces the challenge of satisfying the need for breadth, to represent all the disciplines that contribute to it, without compromising the need for depth, to treat each contributing discipline in a substantive way.

The solution was to enlist many co-authors for a book with a core text and nearly six hundred supplemental endnotes tagged by discipline. This book architecture lends itself to implementation in ebook formats with hypertext links to or transclusion of the endnotes.  It also implies a clear path for evolving the book and ebooks over time because annotations and content suggestions by readers and instructors can be incorporated as additional endnotes without jeopardizing the overall integrity of the text.

Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the School of Information.  Before coming to Berkeley in 2002, he spent a decade in Silicon Valley, where he founded or co-founded four companies in the areas of electronic publishing and e-business. He previously spent worked in corporate R&D and consulting, mostly at Bell Laboratories.  He has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of California, San Diego and an MS in Software Engineering from the Wang Institute.