UALR’s master of science in information quality, a first in the world program developed by the University’s Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering in collaboration with MIT’s information quality program, will begin next year offering a distance learning version of the program world-wide.

The IQ program developed by UALR’s CyberCollege and MIT, with financial sponsorship from Acxiom Corp. in Little Rock, will begin a distance education component in collaboration with universities in Germany, Australia, and Hong Kong to make the program available on their campuses.

UALR began the program this year with an inaugural class of 25 students. Distant learning students will double the enrollment in UALR’s program next year.

“In many ways, we should not be surprised by the widespread interest in information and data quality,” says Dr. John Talburt, the graduate coordinator for the program.

“As public and private organizations world-wide increase their reliance on information for all aspects of their operation and decision making, the real costs of “dirty data” are increasing as well. Inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, and out-of-date information create operational errors, poor decisions, and damaged customer relations that cost government and industry billions of dollars a year.”

In November, Dr. Mary Good, dean of the UALR’s Donaghey College, delivered a progress report on the UALR IQ program at the 2006 International Conference on Information Quality at MIT, noting data quality is an emerging information science discipline.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently launched the Journal of Data and Information Quality, major sign that IQ is becoming a separate discipline.

The new journal’s managing editor, Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, is a member of the UALR Information Science faculty.