I am the "Cybrarian" of which Morville speaks...

I was reading through Chapter 2 of Information Architecture today when I found the section on who's qualified to do information architecture, and I was absolutely taken with the word "cybrarian." It's page 19, for anyone who wants to check it out. I've also been doing some readings from Ambient Findability, so if I start talking about stuff that's not in our text, that's where it's from.

I think becoming a cybrarian is my ultimate career goal through all of this; this class has been so helpful in just giving things names. I used to tell people I wanted to use my librarian skills to design better databases and search systems, and now I have terms--real career terms, and not words I bumble around trying to explain--for information architecture and cybrarian. (And even better, the jobs actually sound as cool as I think they are!)

Somehow in my brain this whole phenomenon of naming ties back to good labeling practices in design. It's like when a website is poorly designed and you kind of have to hit around a lot of related concepts before you get where you want to go vs. having a direct keyword link. Words for concepts are absolutely amazing in the power they can give you; I think that's why I first became interested in linguistics.