A growing number of presentations from the Information Architecture Summit 2008 (April 10-14, 2008 – Miami Florida)

“At the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas, IAKM worked to gather video interviews from the top and pioneering professionals in the Information Architecture-related fields. Through the course of the Summit, many interviews were collected to be used in IAKM courses as well as in an effort to create a video history of the discipline. Following are some clips from the interviews. A video repository is currently under development.” (Information Architecture and Knowledge Management Kent State University) – courtesy of bloug

“There have been some absolutely phenomenal presentations at the IA Summit in Miami so far. If you didn’t happen to make it out to the conference or you’d like to revisit the material, I’ve amassed a list of IA Summit podcasts and PowerPoint slides. Not all presentations have been made available online yet so I’ll make a follow-up post in a couple of days to capture any new presentation links.” (NLC Internet Marketing Blog)

“Meeting new people and catching up with old friends is one of my favorite things about attending the IA Summits. The folks in this community are some of the smartest and most welcoming people I know! Alas, while concepts and practices can be clearly conveyed in publications such as Boxes and Arrows, it is very difficult to describe the people behind these ideas in a way that does them justice. Perhaps if they introduced themselves to you.” (Jorge Arango – Boxes and Arrows)

Complete syllabus with lecture notes and audio recordings – “This course introduces the discipline of Document Engineering: specifying, designing, and deploying electronic documents and information repositories that enable document-centric or information-intensive applications. These applications include web services, information supply chains, single-source publishing, composite applications/virtual enterprises/portals, and so on. Course topics include developing requirements, analyzing existing documents and information sources, conceptual modeling, identifying reusable semantic components, modeling business processes and user interactions, applying patterns to make models more robust, representing models using XML schemas, and using XML models to implement and drive applications. The syllabus contains over 20 short case study examples from different industries, with special emphasis on business-to-business, healthcare and medical informatics, and e-government.” (Robert J. Glushko)

“Here are all the recordings from Webstock 08 and Webstock 06. These recordings will be permanently archived at the following links. Where there is no recording for a particular session, that was the decision of the speaker and we fully respect that. (…) We’d love to hear from you if you find these recordings useful. Please drop us a line and let us know, especially if you weren’t at Webstock and/or are from locations other than New Zealand. Enjoy!” (Webstock)

Editorial Insert in the January 21 edition of Fortune Magazine – “Understanding the way information is used is particularly crucial in relation to the Internet: Sites that help users find what they need quickly and easily tend to win customers. Sites that frustrate users lose them—fast. So, to get their data game-plan right, savvy companies are turning to the increasingly important field of information architecture.” (The Information Architecture Institute)

“This year your peers and industry experts will speak about how topics such as social networking, gaming, patterns, tagging, taxonomies, and a wide range of IA tools and techniques can help as users ‘experience information’. – April 10-14, 2008 (Miami, Florida USA)” – (About the Summit)

“The first batch of full videos from the Second Italian IA Summit (Trento, November 16-17 2007) is available from the web site (as published by Brightcove). Some of the presentations are in English, so you might find interesting stuff even if you do not know Italian. The second and final batch will be published in the coming days and the full papers are scheduled for the end of the month.” (Andrea Resmini)

The proceedings of the 2nd Italian Information Architecture Summit held on 16=17 november 2007 in Trento are availble. At the moment only slides, but soon papers and videos too. Furthermore, Paolo Massa and Andrea Resmini publish their trip reports. courtesy of lucarosati

Audio files from the IA Conference in Germany – “Keynote Speech, Victor Lombardi, Smart Experience, New York (USA). Content: Tools – Background – Patterns of other fields (e.g. publishing) – Why tools? – What does this mean for designers? – Tools we can create now.” (Deutsche IA Konferenz 2007 – iavoice) – courtesy of wolfnoeding

“In analyzing 56 intranets, we found many common top-level categories, labels, and navigation designs, but ultimately, the diversity was too great to recommend a single IA.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“In my keynote talk at the 2007 IA Konferenz in Stuttgart, Germany this month, I argued we need to create fewer artifacts and more tools. We’re already doing this, but it’s easy to get stuck in a make-more-web/mobile-sites rut and that could lead to irrelevance.” (Victor Lombardi)

The posters of the third European summit on Information Architecture (21-22 September, Barcelona) are available for download. (euroIA.org)

“It is argued that the actual elements of typical browsing episodes have not been well captured by common approaches to the concept to date. Empirical research results reported by previous researchers are presented and closely analysed. Based on the issues raised by the above research review, the components of browsing are closely analysed and developed. Browsing is seen to consist of a series of four steps, iterated indefinitely until the end of a browsing episode: (1) glimpsing a field of vision, (2) selecting or sampling a physical or informational object within the field of vision, (3) examining the object, and (4) acquiring the object (conceptually and/or physically) or abandoning it. Not all of these elements need be present in every browsing episode, though multiple glimpses are seen to be the minimum to constitute the act. This concept of browsing is then shown to have persuasive support in the psychological and anthropological literature, where research on visual search, curiosity and exploratory behaviour all find harmony with this perspective. It is argued that this conception of browsing is closer to real human behaviour than other approaches. Implications for better information system design are developed.” (Marcia Bates – Information Research Vol. 12 No. 4, October 2006)

“(…) I was in Barcelona for the Euro IA Summit, and I made a solemn vow to my wife and myself that I was actually going to concentrate on doing stuff rather than spending my time and energy blogging about doing stuff. However, it did seem rather churlish not to at the very least post my favourite take-away facts and quotes from the conference itself.” (Martin Belam)

&ot”In this article I argue, with a bit of logic and a bit of experience, that IAs can do their jobs better if they understand organizational change management, even if they don’t need to be change management specialists. I’ll also suggest a variety of concepts and practices that can (hopefully) help IAs in their change agent role, and I promise to throw in something entertaining as well.” (Matthew C. Clarke –

• Information architecture

The proceedings of the third European summit on Information Architecture (21-22 September, Barcelona) are available for download. With its theme ‘Translating Information Architecture’ and under the great orchestration of Eric ‘FatDUX’ Reiss, 150 participants from 18 countries had two great days full of presentation, poster and panel sessions. See how they network at the Flickr picture impression ‘euroIA2007‘. Next year’s euroIASummit (26-27 september 2008) will be in Amsterdam! – (euroIA.org)

“Joe Lamantia dives deep into the components of the building block system. Each has a place in his design framework for dashboards and portals. Get full coverage on how you too can use these same elements in your work.” (Joe Lamantia – Boxes and Arrows)

“After explaining the concepts of patterns and collections, I spoke about how I thought process patterns and design patterns could be combined and about what the benefits would be to designers and team managers (and of course users and clients) once they were combined.” (Peter Boersma)