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[RRE]UCLA PhD program in information studies

``` Dear Friends,

I am writing to ask you to encourage smart people to apply to UCLA's PhD program in information studies. Our department, which began its life as UCLA's library school, is finally, after several years of planning, on the verge (pending approval from the folks in Oakland) of getting its name changed to the Department of Information Studies. This change is part of a larger change in the department's mission: to be an interdisciplinary switchboard for research and professional training on subjects relating to information and its uses in society. Let me sketch my own understanding of our plans for the future, which I hope you will pass along to anyone who might wish to join us.

Our work is concerned with information institutions, that is, the many places in society where the technologies of information get integrated with the human activities and relationships within which information is used. We do technology here but we are not driven by technology. We do economics as well, but we are not driven by economics. Instead, we are driven by the positive social values of connecting people and information in whatever way they can be connected. We are learning how to design new information services, how to deliver information and adapt information technology to particular groups and communities, how to make digital archives usefully available to everyone who needs them, how to facilitate democratic transitions in the information institutions of formerly authoritarian societies, and how to encourage rational choices in the transitions that many institutions in our own society are undergoing in response to the dangers and opportunities of new digital media.

Being at UCLA, we take full advantage of the resources of one of the world's great universities. We cooperate with research and teaching programs in several other departments and schools, most recently on a specialized program in film preservation. By building on a long tradition of organizing information for rational management and easy use, we are bringing a distinctive perspective to work on images and image databases. We have recently participated in the founding of the Sudikoff Institute, which takes an institutional approach to problems of information technology and learning. We organize the Information Studies Seminar, which brings together scholars from every field where information is at stake. Having completed the hard work of transition to our new mission, we are planning even more institution-building of this sort, and we're looking forward to telling you about it.

My own research directions at UCLA involve the interactions between information and institutional change. On an intellectual level, I want to synthesize everything that is known about institutional change in several fields -- economics, law, sociology, political science, and so on -- with the results and methods of research on the social aspects of computing. The short papers that I have been circulating on RRE this year provide some hint about what this synthesis might be like. It seems to me that the world badly needs such knowledge. Everybody knows that information technology will change the world, but nobody knows how. Participants in numerous social institutions have become aware of the long and complex transformation that lies ahead of them, and they have also become aware that the standard ideas about that transformation are mostly simplistic and wrong. I don't know if we can supply any miracle solutions, but we can try, and we can have have fun doing it.

On a practical level, I want to learn to design the new information services. By "design", I don't just mean technical design and I don't just mean institutional design: instead, I mean designing technologies and institutions at the same time. Libraries have long happened in libraries, and I hope they always will. But what would it be like for libraries also to happen on your wrist? A question like that has several parts: what kinds of information would actually be useful to deliver to someone's wrist, where would that information come from, how would it be stored and retrieved and organized and displayed, under what conditions would the service be practical from an economic perspective, and what would be involved in managing the service from day to day? Those same questions could be applied to the invention of new information services in either the private or the public sector, in education or professional settings, and on large or small scales. UCLA would seem like an ideal environment to pursue this project, given its strong professional schools of architecture, law, education, and public policy, among others, and my personal goal is, three years from now, to spend a good-sized hunk of each week brainstorming design problems with interesting people from several disciplinary backgrounds.

The practicalities of applying to our PhD program aren't too terrible. The official deadline passed back in December, but it takes time just to open the envelopes and pull the files together, and any application that we get by February 1st will receive full consideration. The forms you need are all on the Web; start at http://www.gdnet.ucla.edu/ and follow the various links for prospective students in Library and Information Science (which is what we're still called). We'll need GRE scores. Writing samples are important too. The most important thing is the statement of purpose. It's much easier to work with people who know where they're going, who have a goal in the world that they're excited about. The best way to write one of these statements, therefore, is to provide a well-written narrative of one's professional and intellectual development. This narrative should have a plot, and it should develop enough momentum that it's strikingly clear how the applicant's own directions fit with ours. One shouldn't succumb to the temptation of telling us what we want to hear, because we already know that stuff. If we can learn something new from an applicant about the possibilities that have been opened up by the intersection of fields and realities that our newly revolutionized department is about, then that's a good sign.

It is frequently asked what someone can do with a PhD in information studies. The honest answer is that we don't totally know for sure. The school has long had a PhD program, but the redesigned program is new enough that the first few classes of students are still working their way through it. I do know that I just got done sitting on a thesis committee for a guy who wrote a nice thesis for us and got a good job at the University of Kentucky. I also know that departments similar to ours at universities such as Berkeley, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois have been going through similar transitions, and we're pretty confident that together we're the wave of the future. We do know that a PhD program is training in research. If your goal is to become a professional librarian or archivist, you should consider our MLIS program instead -- it, too, is multidisciplinary, and graduates from our master's program are in very great demand and go off into an amazing range of really interesting jobs. But if your goal is to do research, whether in a university or industry environment, then our PhD program is designed to give you a solid grounding in the study of information -- its uses, its technology, and its policy -- as well as making you go out to another UCLA department and acquire a solid grounding in some other discipline as well. The details are all on the Web site.

I hope that's a fair representation of our program. I'm new here so I'm not an authority on anything, but I can at least try to answer any questions.

Thanks a lot

Phil Agre ```

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