This schedule is approximate.  We will modify it as needed.  Also, the initial version of this describes text book readings, but other readings will be assigned as appropriate. 

Week	Date	Topic	Reading
1	8/26-28	Course introduction (notes)	For Thursday - Chapter 1
2	9/2 - 4	Modeling  (notes) Note that Thursday is St. Thomas of Villanova Day	Chapter 2, sections 1-5 for Tuesday,
3	9/9-11	Modeling continued. (notes) Searching the Web	Sections 2.6 - 2.8 for Tuesday Chapter 13 for Thursday
4	9/16-18	Digital Libraries (OAI-Intro, 5SGraph, 5SGen)	Chapter 15
5	9/23-25	Retrieval evaluation	Chapter 3
6	9/30-10/2	Review and Midterm exam (Thursday)	September concept maps
7	10/7-9	Query Languages	Chapter 4
Break	10/12-17
8	10/21-23	Query Operations (Basic vectors and matrix operations)	Chapter 5
9	10/28-30	Query Operations continued. Begin User Interfaces and Visualization.  Guest: Dr. Beck	Chapter 10 sections 1-5
10	11/4-6	DL Logging and XML. Guest: Filip Jagodzinski Finish User Interfaces and Visualization	Rest of Chapter 10
11	11/11-13	Text Operations. (Compression)	Chapter 7
12	11/18-20	Indexing and Searching	Chapter 8
13	11/25	Review and catchup.  Sample questions for exam preparation.  Check status of projects
14	12/2-4	Conference style presentation of projects Attendance and active participation by all students at all sessions required  Abstracts of presentations will be available at least one week ahead of time.  There will be demonstrations of the working projects, and questions, suggestions from the audience
15	12/9	Conference style presentation of projects continues Attendance and active participation by all students at all sessions required  Abstracts of presentations will be available at least one week ahead of time.  There will be demonstrations of the working projects, and questions, suggestions from the audience
16	12/18 1:30-4 pm	Final Examination

Text

Modern Information Retrieval
Recardo Baeza-Yates, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
Addison Wesley/ ACM Press
1999

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Grading
Your performance will be assessed based on regular, active participation in and contribution to the class discussions; the quality of your concept maps, your performance on exams and quizzes, and your semester project. 
Here is the breakdown:

Projects

Projects must be related to the course content.  Here are some ideas for projects:

• Produce the interactive student status tracker for the department web page. 
  
• Devise a relevance checker for information returned from a web search.  Assume you have available only the information you normally see from a web search.  How would you assess relevance of the results returned? 
  
• Create a digital library for some collection of materials.  Do not start from scratch, but find and use existing modules for digital library creation.  I will give you some pointers.

Note - as you do your project, you may find it useful to read ahead in the book to get to the topics that are most relevant to you.  If you need help understanding the topic area, come to me for some extra time with it.

Resource Discovery

In our rapidly evolving discipline, we have to be alert to new resources and find materials to supplement our text and regular readings.  Using the CITIDEL system and other web searching, find materials that are relevant to this course that supplement what is in the textbook.  Look for articles, tutorials, data sets, descriptions of curent research, code modules, etc.  You are required to find a minimum of 10 good resources during the semester.  For each resource that you find, provide a title, a locator, and a 3 or 4 sentence description that will help others understand the value of what you found.  BONUS:  You may earn bonus points to a maximum of an additional 10% of the grade points by finding additional resources.  The submission system for the resources will be available about the middle of September.  You can start searching before then, of course.