Designing a digital documents curriculum

The paper reports on an (in-progress) effort to design a curriculum that will train professionals to use and construct digital documents. As part of an effort to reinvent information studies curriculum at the University of Michigan´s School of Information & Library Studies, a committee has been exploring an interdisciplinary curriculum emphasis that will prepare students to deal with the increasingly important role that digital documents will play in work, education, and daily life. Digital documents include what have been previously called publications, online documents, Web resources, and multimedia materials. The curriculum straddles the traditional fields of information studies, publishing, and of design. It also takes up business issues (such as marketing) and legal issues (such as copyright). The curriculum will train students to provide digital document collection access and support, to be digital publishers and marketers, and to design and develop digital documents. The paper discusses the current design of the curriculum, the process of developing that design, and the problems raised in trying to implement such a design within an existing discipline-based university infrastructure