I’ve been thinking a lot about information architecture lately, both because we’re in the process of redesigning our website at work, and because working on my own website(s) has gotten me thinking more about IA. My only real regret from library school is that I never took an IA course. Several of my friends traveled from Western Mass to Boston each week on semester for an IA course, and I jealously listened to their discussions about it during our lunch break on the following Saturdays.
The topic came up again in a new book group, many of whose members are grad school classmates. We’ll be reading Ambient Findability, a book I’ve been wanting to get to for ages. In the meantime, findability.org led me to an interesting article by Grant Campbell.
The article drew me in because of my renewed obsession with IA, but what really grabbed me was the following passage:
IA professes to be a field of practice, and aspires to be a field of study. As a field of practice, it has no great need to define an intellectual foundation of its own; as a field of study, it can’t live without one. If IA is a field of practice, it simply needs to combine ideas wherever they can be found into a set of practices and skills that others find useful. If IA is a field of study, it requires a distinct field of discourse, with both canonical and resistant texts, multiple voices, and a constellation of methods of inquiry. As a field of practice, IA can lift whatever it wants from philosophy, computer science, architecture, graphic design and library science; as a field of study, IA must appropriate and redefine those things into a common discourse.
I realize I might get in trouble for saying this, but….couldn’t the same be said about library science? Having had an über-intellectual major at an elite college as an undergrad (not entirely a good thing), I was surprised by the almost total lack of attention paid to the intellectual foundation of librarianship when I was in grad school.
Some fellow students and I came together to form a “philosophy of librarianship” reading group, but there was so little written on the subject within the field of library science that finding material to discuss was challenging…..Then the group seemed to be taken over by a couple of philosophers on steroids who seemed most interested in out-muscling each other intellectually, and who moved our discussion so ridiculously far from the practice of librarianship, that I lost interest. One of the things that drew me to librarianship is that it is a field of practice as well as a field of study. But as Campbell says about IA, if it is to be both, it needs an intellectual foundation.
It’s always been disturbing to me that so much of the literature of library science is embarrassingly bad…at least by the standards of other more established fields of study. One of my grad school professors complained about the abundance of what he called how-I-done-it-good articles and the lack of serious research studies. Not to mention the lack of real theory! Campbell talks about the growing pains involved with developing an intellectual discourse in the field of IA. I think librarians need to be prepared for those same growing pains, even though we count as one of the “parent fields” that Campbell thinks is further along in the process.
But the question remains for me: how do we develop an intellectual discourse? Is it happening in our literature and at our conferences, and I just don’t recognize it? Is it happening in our library schools and I somehow missed it in my program? Or is there something else we need to do to move the process along?
Anyone?
