[Sigia-l] IA and medium

[Stewart, Erin [NEA]]

Librarians working in brick-and-mortar are different from IAs that work in digital in at least these four relevant ways:  (1) librarians select, manage, and weed content, (2) librarians research and resolve user needs in a face-to-face real-time environment, (3) librarians train users during the process of "finding", and (4) librarians develop and implement programmatic materials and events based on content and user demand.
 
IA's working on a website are usually one step removed from all of these tasks if they are involved at all.  I believe that the librarian-user relationship is far deeper, and its quality more immediately challenge-able -- maybe because library users are more exposed intellectually and emotionally when they ask a librarian for assistance than when a website user checks out the FAQs or clicks around on the nav options.
 
I wonder how IA would evolve if practitioners had greater responsibility for:
o primary content (or were subject matter experts)
o responding online to users' "where" and "why" questions
o writing context-sensitive help
o defining web tools and other participatory experiences to supplement the primary content on the site.
 
Maybe more of us are performing these activities than the surveys indicate, but my point is that the "nearness" of the practitioner to the users and to the content positively influences the "finding" experience.
 
Erin

 -----Original Message-----
From: Heller, David [mailto:david.heller at documentum.com]
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 12:27 PM
To: 'Paula Thornton '; 'sigia-l at asis.org '
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] IA and medium



Library Sciences is not IA. IA is library science's tangent into UCD for interactive media. the reason we can't say JUST the WEB is b/c of what the web is. It is too limited in scope in that it is defined by HTTP and HTML. to even limit it by Internet doesn't make sense either as the Internet is just the network.

But interactive media is something broad enough to attach to. 

But we can even say that IAs do print if we look at RSW's work. Isn't the Access guide a form of IA? 

What makes IA different from Library Science? 
Influences 
tangential resources 
Is more about design processes (???) 

Why separate from LS? 
B/c some of us came from outside sources and came to teh same conclusions? 
Is there something in our theories that don't match up w/ LIS? Does LIS not say enough? What doesn't it say? 

well, I gave more questions than answers, but I think that IA is LIS interactive, or LIS meets UCD. 

-- dave 


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