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“The good news is there’s no magic involved. Anyone who can focus on both the big picture and detailed elements simultaneously has the potential to be good at IA. (…) In other words, it’s now easier than ever to do it yourself when it comes to creating or updating your site’s IA.”
“An online publication that defines the characteristics, scope, and uses of controlled vocabularies for art and cultural materials, and explains how vocabularies should be integrated in cataloging systems and utilized for indexing and retrieval.”
(Patricia Harpring a.k.a. @PatriciaH500 ~ J. Paul Getty Trust 2010)
“Information architecture is the only field I’m aware of that is concerned with the structural integrity of meaning across contexts.”
“But librarians are a naturally curious and skeptical people and one round of qualitative research would not satisfy them.”
(Lis Pardi a.k.a. @LisPardi ~ Boxes and Arrows)
“Information architecture has been characterized as both an art and a science. Because there’s more evidence of the former than the latter, the academic and research community is justified in hesitating to give the practice of information architecture more attention.”
(Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ ASIS&T Bulletin)
“Initially I went back to 1976. That’s a fairly well-known time when Wurman introduced the idea of the architecture of information at this conference that he was the chairman of in Philadelphia but then going further back from there the artifacts become increasingly more difficult to get your hands on and yet the payload for how it could influence how we do our work today gets richer and richer.”
(Patrick Quattlebaum a.k.a. @ptquattlebaum ~ Adaptive Path)
“Successful cross-channel user experiences rely upon a strong informational layer that creates understanding amongst users of a service. This pervasive information layer helps users form conceptual models about how the overall experience works (irrespective of the channel in which they reside). This paper explores the early development of a practical framework for the creation of meaningful cross-channel information architectures or ‘architectures of meaning’. We explore the strategic roles that individual channels can play as well as the different factors that can degrade a user’ s understanding within a cross-channel user experience.”
(Jon Fisher, Simon Norris, and Elizabeth Buie ~ Journal of Information Architecture Fall 2012)
“Imagine if you will information architecture as a pimply-faced, malcontent teenager. IA is eager to express and redefine itself. It wants to be an individual yet accepted by its peers. It is simultaneously aggravated and apathetic about its parents, mentors, and role-models. It is a bit of a mess, but a wonderful, beautiful mess with endless opportunity and potential.”
(Jeff Pass a.k.a. @jeffpass ~ Boxes and Arrows)
“UX in libraries needs to be a completely immersive experience. We make sure our shelves are full of items patrons want and need. The surroundings are designed to be home-like with fireplaces, couches, power outlets, lamps, and meeting rooms. Across the country, libraries are thus transforming themselves from book warehouses to places where people want to come and hang out.”
(Amanda L. Goodman a.k.a. @alagoodman ~ UX Magazine)
“We inhabit many different semantic environments as we go about our lives. For example, religion is one such semantic environment: we use a particular set of words, in particular ways, when we are in church. Semantic environments are also composed of many subenvironments.”
(Jorge Arango a.k.a. @jarango)
“The research captured unique IA practice definitions and related concepts that have given shape to the industry. Works are cited because they have persisted and are actively endorsed, practiced or developed as an area of research and theoretical inquiry.”
(Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ DSIA)
“Browsing the Web. Surfing the Net. Navigating a Web site. Traversing a hierarchy. Going back. Scrolling up and down. Returning home. We’ve seen such metaphors throughout our history of using computers to interact with information. Haphazard though they may seem be, these metaphors highlight a universal reality of human psychology: we perceive the world – both physical and digital- – in spatial terms.”
(Tyler Tate a.k.a. @tylertate ~ UXmatters)
“One of the most difficult aspects of moving content to the Web is that webs are not organized like other things — books in particular. And the difference is not small. It is not that web organization is somewhat different from book organization. It is so different that you can’t even look at web organization the way you look at book organization.”
(Mark Baker a.k.a. @mbakeranalecta ~ Every Page Is One)
“Brussels, Belgium, Europe, 1895: two men shared a dream of ‘indexing and classifying the world’s information’. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s work foreshadowed the network of knowledge that a century later became the Internet with its search engines! Otlet and La Fontaine aimed to preserve peace by assembling knowledge and making it accessible to the entire world. They built an international documentation center called Mundaneum. They invented the modern library Universal Decimal Classification system. La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913. By 1935, their Mundaneum grew to a staggering 16 million cards covering subjects ranging from the history of hunting dogs to finance! World War II and the death of both founders slowed down the project. Although many Mundaneum archives were stored away, some even in the Brussels subway, volunteers kept the dream alive. The French community government of Belgium brought most of the archives to a beautiful Art Deco building in the heart of Mons near Brussels.”
Interview with Karen McGrane. ~ “For us this is a generational issue, and it’s our life’s work to help contribute to organizations’ learning how digital design (and information architecture) should fit into their organization. If we are going to be successful, we may not fix it for ourselves, but for the next generation of digital designers, I want to leave those organizations better off. There will also be some social darwinism, where the organizations that successfully navigate this transition are the ones that are going to survive.”
“Many practitioners of information architecture have come to understand the fundamentals of creating an information architecture through direct training, text books about practical methods, or real-world experience. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find documentation on the formal theory of information architecture.”
(Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters)
“As a digital analyst, it’s my job to study how technology disrupts business markets and models. As an aspiring social scientist, I also study technology’s impact on culture and behavior. These two worlds are colliding with increasing velocity as each day passes. One of the trends I’ve been following over the last several years is the relationship between TV, smartphones, tablets and PCs.”
(Brian Solis a.k.a. @brainsolis)
“We organize things, we organize information, we organize information about things, and we organize information about information. But even though “organizing” is a fundamental and ubiquitous challenge, when we compare these activities their contrasts are more apparent than their commonalities. We propose to unify many perspectives about organizing with the concept of an Organizing System, defined as an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support. Every Organizing System involves a collection of resources, a choice of properties or principles used to describe and arrange resources, and ways of supporting interactions with resources. By comparing and contrasting how these activities take place in different contexts and domains, we can identify patterns of organizing. We can create a discipline of organizing in a disciplined way.”
“Technology won’t save the day, and teachers can’t cross the chasm alone. Designers, developers, publishers, and librarians are just a few of the folks needed to build these cross-platform services and structures for learners. And those of us outside the schools can’t wait to be invited. We must crash the party. So, in the spirit of transgression, let’s now explore the perilous intersection of technology, pedagogy, and the future of education.”
(Peter Morville a.k.a. @morville ~ Semantic Studios)
“Despite their best intentions, user experience designers and taxonomy and metadata developers have often found that their work is not well connected, even though both are highly interrelated. For example, a design might be proposed that needs segmentation of content by user role, but there may not be metadata associated with content that captures the role, resulting in the need for detailed review of content and hand coding to create the experience. Taxonomists might build a taxonomy for roles without knowing which roles the design uses, leading to over- or under-specification of the taxonomy.”
(Carol A. Hert, Gary Carlson, and Bram Wessel ~ ASIS&T Bulletin, December 2012/January 2013)
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