Peter Morville, @morville, Slides — including book titles (I want to build a book list of all of his recommendations!)
Books: Info Architecture; Ambient Finadability; Search Patterns; Intertwingled (everything is connected; from code to culture)
Intertwingled has five chapters: Nature; Categories; Connections; Culture; Limits
Peter worked on an evaluation of Library of Congress’ web presence. Very complex. Report written up; brutally honest. Compared to Winchester Mystery House: Fragmentation & Findability; report embargoed. Too sensitive.  Trickled up gradually to ex committee & brought back in, and changes made in the web presence. Didn’t go as far as he wanted to.
Org chart of LoC. Brought in by a middle manage. Could see problem,but couldn’t solve. Didn’t have authority. Ex. committee formed web governance board; chief of staff, chair of board. Had authority now to affect change. But didn’t get as far as we liked….because there are a lot of people involved. Big culture. Changing culture is really difficult even when you have executive leadership & internal champion.
Harvard — first portal, consistent interface across all libraries. web discovery solution.
Books he was reading at one time…
- Disrupting Class (christensen)
- Making Learning Whole (Perkins)
- Make it stick (Brown)
Teaching is an impt part of what librarians do; ref interview is impt teachable moment
The Simplicity Cycle book — every feature we add, adds goodness to the system, but as we add features, it gets more complex, and at a point, it gets too complex and confusing.
1. Nature
- Build cycle
- Fuzzy line bw Inspiration & Planning
- Wonders of failure..until someone gets a larval cyst in the brain
- Planning/Building/Doing/Thinking dichotomy – find right balance and context
- Thinking in Systems, book
- Language for mapping complex systems
- The art of systems architecting “it is the responsibility of the architect to know and concentrate on the critical few details and the areas that really matter”
- Keystone species (Polar Bear)
2. Categories
- Categories have values but problems too — Sorting Things Out: Classification and It’s Consequences book
- Info architects work with categories; taxonomies, nav systems; UI/UX; optimization & search optimization
- Need to go deeper on classification. Categories are cornerstone of culture & cognition.
- Bounded Set (simple, but wrong); Centered Set (Hebert; inclusive; direction); Fuzzy Set (most are in this; better examples, worse)
- We use radio buttons when checkboxes or sliders would reveal the truth — do it to users & selves
3. Connections
- Pages/Websites — Hyperlinks
- Space/Places — Paths
- Mind/Categories — Connections
- Time/Actions — Consequences
- Systemantics (Gall) — “The systems always kicks back” know you’re succeeding when you get a knife in your back
- If you think info arch hasn’t changed since the polar bear, you’re simply not paying attention:
- The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley)
- Users & Stakeholders both need to be studied
4. Culture
- Corporate Culture (Schein) — Artifacts; Espoused Values; Underlying Assumptions — three levels of culture — have to dig deeper & deeper. Â mapping culture to understand what’s going on
- The culture map
- Organizational Traps — double-loop learning in orgs (and individuals) is rare: Change actions or behaviors based on feedback; willing to change those. Resistant to changing beliefs even in the face of feedback.
- HIppocrates’ Shadows
- Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder (taleb) — naive predisposition to intervention
- 4-minute mile barrier
5. Limits
- Depressing but impt books: Living beyond limits: Ishamel & The Limits to growth & The Sixth extinction
- Daylighting
- Making the invisible visible
- Baker Library @ Harvard, Not website redesign, but opportunity to map library ecosystem & then remap library website as part of that ecosystem
- “How do you do research?” & developed maps
- faculty research map — Idea Generation, Exploration, research experiment fieldwork, Analysis, Synthesis, Writing, Editing, Feedback, Publishing, Promotion
- MBA Student Research — case busting — teachable moments in their life cycle: Interview with a Harvard MBA student: We’re in the middle of the library, which means we’re trying to be quiet; she showed me how to do a few things, but I forgot them once I left; I would really like to learn how to do this, maybe I’m just a totally dumb user. Tweaking lots of things (ref interview followup by email; website changes). Across channels for tremendous opps to improve experience & service.
Homework
- PIck a context & map a system
- Then, Map the broader context — the system outside the system
- Share the map
- Start mapping for purposes of understanding
“Where architects use forms and spaces to design environments for inhabitation, info architects use nodes & links to create environments for learning & understanding”
Need to look at architecture for understanding
- Microscope — Dig down into the details to look into the messiness
- Telescope — see big picture
- Kaleidoscope — to ???
- Physical, Historical Architecture — Strength, Utility, AND beauty
“Each step is a potential place; place to worship, place to watch, place to sell, place to sleep, place to die and be burned.” Donlyn Lyndon
No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it -Frank Lloyd Wright
Not just place of books or information. The library is an act of inspiration architecture and a keystone of culture. Bridges bw physical and digital. Communities and individuals. Impt bc library is connected in all sorts of ways. Everything is deeply intertwingled.