IA Summit Redux, redux

Someone asked me to move a post about what I thought of the IA summit on a public forum, presumably so they could refer to what I said, but you never know. here goes…

I was sort of struck by the way that the conference sessions were running, in that lots of people were grabbing on particular strategies (design patterns, for example) and running with them. It struck me as both a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because it will improve the overall quality of IA, bad because it seems to be a easy hit for toolmakers. Coming back down, for example, I figured out a way to make tools that generate a company’s commonly used design patterns in a relatively straightforward fashion given a couple of assumptions about their site architecture and database storage (but only assumptions found in LIS 540-543.)

What that means is that at some point a tools vendor will come along and make a lot of the things that we’re seeing know available as part of some suite. So, if I have to guess based on previous examples, it means that there will be a large growth in ### of IAs over the next two years and then probably go back to around the number that we have now after that as things move from art to craft. I dunno, I’m guessing that’s not what I was supposed to take away from the conference. I did learn a lot about a variety of different things that I hadn’t been exposed to much, like design patterns for websites and a lot of things about tagging that I hadn’t considered.

Personally, I think that the most insightful presentation with the biggest implications for design of projects whose information organzation deliverables have long expected lifecycles was the presentation by Campbell and Fast, described here: http://www.iasummit.org/2006/conferencedescrip.htm#164 I think that their work had insights into the nature of the lifecycle of websites versus the use of information organization that was pretty useful, and I’m hoping to get more details on it over time.

There are some references to iSchool specific stuff here, LIS54# classes are all databases and information retrieval systems.