I am miffed at my ISP. This site has been down for almost one week. Now we are back.

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.

A friend at the library told me about a class she coordinated last week. The class was called something like PC Basics For Seniors. Twelve people came to learn how to turn a PC on and off. Eight of the twelve returned later in the week to practice on/off for two hours. If that puts a lump in your throat, think about getting an MLS.

What is Information Architecture?

Karl Fast and Christina Wodtke are collecting Argus elegies.

Interview: Jeffrey Zeldman by Meryl K. Evans

Task-Centered Design by Albert Harum-Alvarez

Catherine and I ordered a pepperoni pizza from Domino’s and are settling in to finish a special project. “Domino’s,” you ask, “why Domino’s when you are in NYC?” We had to do it just like we had to have chili dogs the other day.

Want to know what the special project is?

Top Secret File No. 01 SS BL NYPL is now finished.

It’s the Scout page. She will cut you.

Came across this in a forum. Is this the sort of thing that gets your panties in a bunch? I think someone wants to start a cash drawer committee. Arggg.

At my library, we have two cash drawers. However, both of them pull out to a right angle. Like, sideways.

It never feels right when I go to make change for a twenty. It would be easy enough to get a smaller cash drawer which would fit correctly. But then that would disturb the charm of the anomaly, wouldn’t it. Recently, it occurred to me to stand sideways, so that the drawer would line up correctly. When I tried it, I realized that the order of the dollar bills was backward anyway.

Source: Library Science on About, Library Forum, http://forums.about.com/ab-librarians/messages/?msg=175.1, Accessed March 25, 2001.