Rogue Librarian

Argus Associates will close its doors this month.

In 1993 Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville graduated from the library school at The University of Michigan and began building their new business, Argus Associates. This was one of the first IA firms anywhere.

I started the same masters program a couple of years later. As their business was taking off, they would come and talk to my class about the relatively new field of IA. It was these talks that instilled in my pals and me the belief that librarians have a very important and particular contribution to make to the Web. That contribution is based on our collective background as catalogers and indexers.

When O’Reilly published Rosenfeld and Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web in 1998, we sat in Ann Arbor cafes reading our new handbook, satisfied that more and more people would see what librararians had to offer. “Controlled vocabulary” and “taxonomy” would become industry buzzwords; we would be the new experts.

My gang left Ann Arbor with our MILS’s degrees and the Rosenfeld/Morville bible tucked under our arms, ready to solve the navigational needs of Web users everywhere. We were armed with a little bit of knowledge and a whole lot of zeal. A few of my friends were a little skeptical.

We would take our ideas to academic libraries, public libraries, and corporations. There our approach to IA would sometimes be challenged and sometimes be embraced. Some of us would eventually reject the “Arugs method”. Others would refine the approach while working with people from other schools of thought. Some of us would work Arugs ideas into impressive projects with big budgets. Others would take what we had leanred and quietly perfect small library Web sites.

This wide descemination of the Argus approach to information architecture is not Rosenfeld and Morville’s only contribution. They also made us feel good about being librarians. Ours is a profession that is from time to time plagued by a sense of inferiority. Librarians sometimes feel as though the popular perception of us is women with buns shoshing, stamping and shelving. Argus made us feel that our craft was smart, relevant, and vital and that our skills would be the key in making good use of the Web.

N.B. The Argus Center for Information Architecture is still open and Morville and Rosenfeld are now working as consultants.