Reflection on the Guest Speaker

Yesterday we had a guest speaker, Amanda, who talked to us about Information Architecture and the practical applications "in the trenches."

adobe connect -- the online conferencing software we used to meet with Amanda.

What struck me most about the presentation was that I never knew careers of this kind actually existed. At a job I used to work at, I was the primary designer of the text mining and semantic mapping strategies, including search functionality and interface design. I have some decent programming skills, but they weren't really sophisticated enough to complete the project on my own, so I worked with programmers to get things done. I had never considered this kind of work as information architecture--when I was working there, I don't think I even knew that term to apply it to what I was doing.

Since getting into my program for library science, I've had several experiences with librarians frustrated with the catalog search systems they have to deal with. The most frequent dissatisfactions seem to be that the design is cumbersome because there are too many search fields to do with, or the search fields/algorithms do not return the desired results. With my background in computers, I've been greatly influenced to try to solve this problem. Before the presentation I had been considering academic or special libraries, but I think I'm going to add information architecture to the list. Some of the companies out there designing software for use in libraries or by librarians seem to need more input on how the programs are used and the importance of a simple design that can achieve "Find It" results fast.