Louis Rosenfeld in a basement room at Maryland
I took a long lunch yesterday and went across campus to the Hornbake building where an e-mail had promised I would find in person Louis Rosenfeld co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web . He was there at the invite of the local ASIS chapter- all graduate students and faculty with the MLS program here. I may have been the only one that actually bought and read his book. Heck, I've even read Christina Wodtkes'. Louis struck me as a bright personable energetic and engaged sort, not that this was any different than what I had expected to find. It just seemed so unusual. After a period of introductions , he began an informal discussion among the group. Pointing out that information architecture as practiced is necessarily a multi-disciplined activity he questioned the commitment of library science programs around the country to multi-disciplinary approaches. Such approaches presuppose a more theory based or abstact focus, certainly a more information-centric one. This accounts for the move of many library science programs to insert the word 'information' into their titles somewhere. Some fun was had here at the expense of those schools who have simply declared themselves to be the Information program at such and such University. Behind all this is the acknowledgment that many library programs in higher education tend to be very vocational in nature. They are full of people in the midst of a career change or looking to position themselves for career advancement in the work they already do. They are focused and goal-oriented towards the MLS certificate. Typically there will be a dromedarian look to the student demographic between these people, and those following straight on from an undergraduate degree. The latter group is also more likely to make up the ranks of the doctoral program.
The point Rosenfeld (MLS, U. Michigan) was trying to make with this discussion was that the needs of information architecture as a field and profession will not be answered by library programs that see themselves as primarily training librarians to work in libraries rather than, say, teaching librarianship. Later on a second cycle of discussion arose over whether the ASIS(&T) is the best professional organization for information architects to hang their hat or not. Louis Rosenfeld has been instrumental in setting up a supplemental organization aifla.org to focus on the concerns of those practicing information architecture in addition to the existing sigIA.
Amid these longer discussions some other items where also brought up. How and at what point web resources are taught or approached within the context of reference work - in introductory courses or advanced? How are web sites found, browsed, evaluated, and mined for content by information seekers? Use of the internet to both identify and represent individual expertise in a subject was mentioned along with ancillary topics collaborative and trust networks. At the point when I had to head back to work, the discussion had shifted to the semantic web. Once a promising concept even a buzzword it is now widely regarded as: "a nice topic for research". The semantic web was going to live or die on the strength of connecting metadata to content. Metadata being most easily described as information (how much, how recent, by whom, pertaining to what etc.) about the main content. The HTML variant of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative offered a decent framework for capturing for web pages the heart of International standard book description principles, but one entity that could make the best use of that data, the search engine Google, reputedly ignores it. When I think of a rigorously realized semantic web, I tend to think of a fully described XML RDF - I think of things like the MARC (MAchine Readable Catalog) : XML project. Marc is the database and transfer format for the information on a given books library catalog card, it represents the culmination of approximately fifty years of intellectual effort by a large number of people. In its XML variant, it is semantic web friendly. Most things (information entities) suitable themselves to the semantic web's ideals are generally already in databases, the realization of a prior capital investment. I had largely forgotten the semantic web until it was mentioned among this group. This weblog; however, being generated by Radio Userland software lives in the xml ocean - one of the more fascinating features of Radio is the news aggregator spinning off the RSS functionality. I thought, as Louis Rosenfeld, who has a weblog of his own talked, RSS is the semantic web but it is bottom up, a partial, particular, but genuinely networked semantic web. As opposed to big comprehensive RDF projects which could be characterized as top down. A semantic web of sorts probably will come about but it will be a gradual process of small xml outlining, and scripting applications reaching out to each other in fullfillment of specific needs.
There were points in his talk where I felt a little on the spot. I am in fact a library technician - a clerk - who occasionally entertains the thought of applying to library school. I'd hate to think that people like me might hold the profession down. I would far more likely look at the new as yet unaccredited information science program than the traditional library program, and would be more likely to use this information to pursue ends arrayed out of my (almost completed) undergraduate degree in government and politics. I would be... less likely to use it in ways directly related with my current position in technical services of a large library. I had read Rosenfeld's book and was inspired head down to this talk because of joining a committee tasked with bringing the several hundred assorted web pages belonging to the Technical Services Department into some order, control and usefulness. A task which is turning out to be harder and considerably more interesting than mundane set of tasks that comprise modern copy cataloging.
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