Interdisciplinarity, interactivity, and interoperability for educating the digerati

Abstract

As networked digital information proliferates and modern society's need to have access to information irrespective of location rises, the education needed for the digerati, defined loosely as the digital intelligentsia, the whole class of expert digital information professionals, becomes an important area about which all information professionals should stay informed. This paper describes the three concepts - interdisciplinarity, interactivity, and interoperability - that are an integral part of digital library research and their use in the curriculum development, teaching, and learning of a specific area of study within Library and Information Science (LIS), namely knowledge organization (KO). KO, studied intellectually, self-referentially, and immersively, it is argued, can provide the foundation for the modern digerati. This is a preprint of a paper published in Education for Information 23 (4): 233-243. The paper elaborates a presentation made at the IMLS Workshop on Digital Libraries Education (JCDL 2005).