Week 8: At Last, Librarianship

This week’s reading: Morville & Rosenfeld, Chapters 17 and 18

Our topics this week – first, marketing our services to skeptical managers, and second, comparing IA to business strategy – were far enough outside my experience that I’m not sure how to react to them in a way that goes beyond recapitulation. I think I can best elaborate by comparing the challenges information architects face in justifying their existence to the challenges librarians face in doing the same.

Let’s begin with the obvious. Though the specifics of their duties differ, information architects and librarians are both broadly in the business of making information accessible. Both design systems of organization and labeling to make their information systems more transparent to the user, both create and use metadata extensively to expedite searches, and both are concerned with economizing user effort. As a result of their shared central mission, both librarians and information architects sometimes face questions from decision makers who do not perceive disorganized information as a serious problem.

Google Search, in particular, has contributed to the false impression that all the information in the world is now organized and accessible. Public librarians tear out their hair when their acquisitions budget is cut because Google is free; information architects gnash their teeth when the client wants to install a Google Custom Search bar and dispense with the messy process of web architecture. Sure, Google can’t design our reference queries or our browsing hierarchies, but do users really need that stuff anyway? It falls to us to make the case that, yes, users do need that stuff – and lots more besides that Google can’t do.

Not all of the text’s suggestions on how information architects can make this case are equally applicable to librarians. For instance, public and academic librarians are unlikely to impress policymakers with a return-on-investment analysis, which would contain even more unknowns than a similar IA analysis and would operate outside the myopic timeframe with which their funding authorities concern themselves. But librarians can make good use of the “pain is your best friend” principle (p. 375). We can use stories and presentations to illustrate the often humorously painful consequences of replacing human expertise with search software. We can challenge the policymaker to find a particular commonly sought piece of information using Google, forcing him or her to confront the imperfections of Google directly. We can even use comparative analysis to point up the exact stages where human reference librarians add value to a search process, as well as the types of patrons (such as the young, elderly, and uneducated) who have special trouble conducting information searches by machine.

One important difference between IA’s image problems and those of librarianship looks to the future. The mood in the IA community, as on page 377 of the reading, seems to be that broader recognition of the role of information architects is inevitable. By contrast, the mood in the library community is that future technologies will pose even more stringent challenges to our necessity than current tools already have. I conclude that it might be wise for librarians to restyle their role in civic life as including social information architecture. Library websites should evolve past being electronic card catalogs and instead seek to architect a broad information system, encompassing both physical and Internet resources, that is responsive to the most common needs of its users. This goal is particularly ambitious – most websites undertake to organize a much more limited set of resources – but some libraries, including USF’s, have already begun such an undertaking. I can think of a number of ways to make such a project feasible, and perhaps I’ll study something like this as part of my term paper!