[Sigia-l] IA and medium

[Ben Henick]

On Mon, 13 May 2002, Christina Wodtke wrote:

> As I said, it is applicable to other mediums, but is it in it's most
> realized form in the web/internet? The classification systems you mention

Absolutely not.  *grin*  Hypertext as a medium was roundly immature until 
fifteen years ago.  Who's to say what the form and function of our 
information systems fifteen years from now, will be?  Surely the 
progression will be visible to anyone who has "been around" but in fact 
there is plenty of evolution and maturation yet to take place.

> were neatly seen to by librarians. Is an IA only a librarian with a fancy
> title? What makes an IA not a librarian?

David Heller provided an answer - with his use of the word 'interactive' 
- for this that is strikingly close to my own, so I'll just strip the 
jargon (which was my original plan anyway).

Where a librarian classifies and organizes a discrete collection of 
information, he has no influence over the information itself... meanwhile 
an outcome of the IA process may well be the creation or removal of 
information for the benefit of a system (with 'system' in this instance 
understood to be an intranet or external Web site).

In real terms, this can be seen as demanding that an IA have greater 
knowledge in depth when compared to her librarian counterpart, for 
example.

A tangential point that strikes me is that while a librarian is quite 
likely to interact with real flesh-and-blood "end users" the same is less 
true for a Web-centric information architect... in the latter case, most 
of the interaction occurs at one stage early in the process.

I will leave the professional implications of this "split" to be examined 
by the full-time IA/LIS folks.


-- 
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large              Managing Editor
http://www.io.com/persist1/      http://www.digital-web.com/
persist1 at io.com                  bmh at digital-web.com
--
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"I think so, Brain, but... (snort) no, no, it's too stupid."
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