[Sigia-l] IA and Medium

[Tanya Rabourn]

"Kathryn Lewellen" wrote:
> In my experience, "we help people find
> information" and trying to provide expertise in too
> many different areas doesn't work. I think IA NEEDS to
> be medium specific to gain acceptance and
> understanding.

I think a concerted effort to tie IA to one medium would be misguided.
Libraries are currently dealing with the misconception that they are tied
to one medium (print/books). The skills one needs to practise IA are
transferable to other media. Considering that most if not all of the
skills existed prior to the Internet, it's not difficult to imagine IA
skills being applicable elsewhere.

Promote the misconception that IA equals organization of information and
wayfinding on the web and sooner or later IA will be viewed as irrelevant.
(You'll have departments at universities changing their names' from "The
school of information architecture and science" to just "The school of
information," with the hope that shaking off that dowdy IA tag will let
others know that their graduates' skills are still relevant.<g>)

Ben Henick wrote:
> Where a librarian classifies and organizes a discrete collection of
> information, he has no influence over the information itself...

Publishers that sell primarily to librarians (Dialog, lexis-nexis, etc.)
definitely take into account what libraries need when formulating their
products. That communication between libraries and publishers can be
considered exerting influence.

> 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).

I don't believe that's a good example of where IA and librarianship
differ. Libraries have collecting levels and elect not to purchase and
decide what to get rid of based on their user population and mission.

> 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.

In depth knowledge of the content? I don't see how you concluded that.
Libraries don't weed books unless they know that they can consider the
content superceded or irrelevant for their user population. Law
librarians must have a law degree or significant course work towards that
degree in addition to an MLIS, for example.

I think IA differs from librarianship in that IA is more user centered and
also draws heavily from information design (RSW) and HCI methods. By
saying that IA is more user centered, I don't mean that librarians ignore
their current user population, they just know that the way they organize
something today must be usable by the current population and by those that
come fifty years later.

It will be interesting to see if when IA matures it will take more of a
longview of things. Perhaps whether or not that is necessary is where IA
and the web meet.

-Tanya
___________________________________
Tanya Rabourn <rabourn at columbia.edu>
[User Services Consultant]
AcIS R & D <www.columbia.edu/acis/rad>
tel: 212.854.0295