How to succeed in information architecture while really trying

By all accounts, I was on the upswing. It was a beautiful early spring day in Southern California, and I was outside taking a break from my new job as a library paraprofessional (my 4th different role in as many years). And I didn’t know it yet, but I was a few minutes away from making one of the most consequential decisions of my life.

Frankly, I was struggling with the prospect of seeing myself succeed in academic libraries long-term. Because I worked full-time and attended grad school part-time, I didn’t have the time to seek out the kinds of internships and volunteer opportunities that successful applicants to librarian positions usually have on their resumes. And although I had been working in libraries for several years, that work was done with a non-librarian title, and was thus automatically devalued by any potential librarian hiring committees. I was also suffering from compassion fatigue.

Dealing with my uncertain future and emotional burnout is how I found myself so sad in such an objectively gorgeous setting. Finally I just… had enough. So I looked up the careers page of my grad school and compared it to the classes on offer for that term. Information architecture was one of the potential career paths, and some brief googling led me to believe that the financial prospects were significantly better than traditional library work. Intro to Information Architecture had a waitlist, but it was a short one, and I was confident I would get in soon enough (I did, and my first lesson was the value of the abbreviation “IA”).?

Fortunately for me, I enjoyed the class. Over the next year and a half, I connected with practitioners, got myself a mentor, worked on a relevant capstone project, and eventually landed my role at Factor. It was a revelation to discover a field that cared more about my skills and abilities than the titles I held along the way. The road involved perhaps more unintentional naps in the middle of homework than I anticipated, but I’m glad I can look back on my journey now with the emotional distance afforded to me by my full-time IA job. And since this month marks my first full year at Factor, I’ve been thinking about my time in libraries more than usual. I’m glad that chapter is over, but I walked away with at least three lessons for my IA work:

• Solve unexpected information problems
• Respond to user needs, not just user wants
• Information literacy is never irrelevant

Solve unexpected information problems

The American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association publishes guidelines for providing library services, all aimed at creating an environment in which library users are encouraged to ask questions. This is a notoriously difficult skill to teach in a classroom, and I believe my strongest abilities in this area result from the experience of tens of thousands of questions fielded at a library desk rather than any class I took. Some of the most interesting questions I’ve received include:

• Can you get rid of the guy with the cat?
• Can you help my friend here find a course reserve? He just got sick outside.
• Aren’t my hands cold?
• You’re wrong about the paralegal area of the library being removed a few years ago, can you please tell me where I can find it?
• What should I do about my instructor who makes fun of me for being Native American?

And these are just the ones I could easily recall; many library workers have much more intense stories. Even for less extreme questions, the resolution involves the discomfort of admitting an information gap and learning new information. Despite the reputation as a bookitorium where books go to live forever, academic libraries are all about facilitating those information connections in as safe a space as possible for users. My favorite part of library work was always about those connections: connecting to the user when they have a need, connecting that need to my knowledge of library and campus resources, and then connecting that user with the best information.?

As an IA, the satisfaction I get from making those connections is a little less immediate. It usually takes our team weeks or even months to resolve issues as complex as our clients usually present. Yet there’s a different kind of satisfaction in not just solving a problem within a paradigm, but getting to change the paradigm itself. If there was an issue with the user experience or with the metadata in the library, I had to figure out a way around it and maybe bring it up to a librarian or other higher-up (the ones that would listen to a paraprofessional, at least). Now, I get to help model the metadata. I get to work at the system level, and not just on retrieving the resources within it.

Respond to user needs, not just user wants

In her landmark essay “The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques,” Marcia J. Bates models a vision of information seeking that allows for data gained during the process to revise the query. In short, it lays out how time for browsing and exploration can help refine the nature of a query. “Berrypicking” is essentially how we taught students to research. Whenever possible, I tried to encourage students to refrain from procrastinating but in practice, it happened somewhat less often than it should have. The users usually wanted to spend their time doing other things (pretty normal for an undergrad, especially for students with other obligations), and put that ahead of what their research needed.

As goofy as it sounds, it was kind of magical when they had the time and inclination to open themselves up to the serendipity of discovery. Physical resources in academic libraries are usually organized by the Library of Congress Subject Headings, in large part because it helps facilitate berrypicking. Most students with whom I worked preferred using physical resources like books over e-resources, and whenever I explained they could explore specific areas of the stacks related to their topic their eyes lit up and they were eager to go browse. Their research process needed this time and space to think and to refine, even if they would have preferred spending less time on a random paper.

The enterprise clients I work with now are less inclined to berrypicking. Sales needs its spec sheets and Marketing needs its blog posts, and could we please just fix the metadata to make it happen because the execs are breathing down their necks and budgets are in jeopardy? This kind of user stress is very familiar to me (see: the previous section) and it makes sense that they need to be walked through their feelings a little bit. I find myself and my IA colleagues engaging in a little berrypicking of our own during these client conversations. The more information we learn, the more targeted our information problem-solving can be. We usually have to bring our clients along on this journey, providing them with context about the ultimate value of the capabilities our work can unlock. We have to teach them what they need for their problems, beyond what they think they want when we start out.

Information literacy is never irrelevant

In my last few months as a library worker, articles and thinkpieces started cropping up about the magical powers of AI and that this shiny new chatbot was going to solve everyone’s information retrieval problems. Libraries had survived the Google hype cycle and other supposed technology crises, so I listened to the smart people in my network about its limitations at the time and trusted that this too would pass.?

Then I picked up a chat question from a grad student at the university. This wasn’t unusual (actually, it was kind of great for our stats that a grad student was using the service), but the completeness of the citation they asked me to help them track down was. So I decided to recalibrate my expectations of grad students and began searching for the article. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find an exact match for the title in either the library discovery platform or the open web. I hunted down the archives of the journal (it took a minute because we didn’t subscribe), and browsed through the cited issue looking for the article. I tried looking up the authors in Google Scholar to confirm the citation. But still, nothing. I replied to the student to ask where they got the article, and they immediately disconnected. I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect this was a hallucinated citation from an AI chatbot.?

One of the first lessons of working with library users is not to unquestioningly accept their information seeking narrative. I don’t mean this maliciously; they simply don’t know as much about the domain of a given library’s resources as the employees do. They may think they’ve searched everywhere, but we have all kinds of tricks and sometimes even different information about the best way to use databases. Even while acknowledging and centering a user’s expertise in their question, effective information work requires a kind of healthy skepticism. I was fortunate enough to get some practical experience in information literacy through teaching students about lateral reading and completing coursework with UW’s Center for an Informed Public. More than ever, these skills are necessary in an information environment rife with misinformation and disinformation that can feed into and result from AI training models.?

In conclusion

In a convenient foil to my spring crisis a couple years ago, it’s now autumn and my IA path is going pretty well. I’m speaking at a conference in November, and–not to brag–but my most recent LinkedIn article was cited in a newsletter by someone I read in library school. I feel like I’m finally on a career journey that sustains me emotionally and financially.?

I have to admit that I would not be half the IA I am today without my library work experience. As critical as library school was to introduce me to the field and to embed me into a professional network, what I learned as a library worker provided the foundation for my current career. I never would have gone to library school if I were not already working in libraries. So I will hang up my MLIS degree, and display my classified staff award in my secondhand hutch. And then crack open my laptop–I have IA work to do.

Epilogue: what happened to the guy with the cat?

Everyone who read drafts of this article had the same question: what happened to the cat? So here follows the saga of the cat in the library.?

My boss at the circulation desk went on (a much-deserved) vacation during the first week of Fall quarter, our busiest week of the year. Several of our part-time employees also ended up calling out. When I say I was busy, I literally mean there were multiple days I did not have a chance to get a drink of water, let alone eat lunch or do any tasks aside from answering questions.

So when someone walked up to the desk with a cat on his shoulder, I was fully prepared to just ignore it and go about my day after watching him go upstairs. Our department had been given a list of questions to ask anyone with an animal, but as anyone who has worked customer service knows, sometimes you let things slide to avoid escalating an already-exhausting shift.?

Then, colleagues from the reference desk and the IT help desk approached me. My IT colleague told me how hard he had to fight for his own accommodations as a low-vision employee and his own friends with guide dogs. For him, this was personal, and he wanted college policy enforced.?

It emerged from our discussion that each of the 3 of us had different understandings of the college policies around animals on campus. I swear it felt like time stopped when they turned their heads to me: what were we going to do? It did not matter that they were faculty and a more senior staff member, respectively. Their jobs had not equipped them for this kind of problem solving–it was on me.?

So I called the Accessibility Office to clarify the policy. It turned out the policy had changed somewhat recently and the new guidance was: the only animals allowed on campus were service animals, which could only be dogs or miniature horses (I never saw a miniature horse, but my boss once saw a student with one in the parking lot). Even if someone claimed a cat as a service animal, it was not allowed. For risk management reasons, they recommended calling in Security to enforce the policy rather than engage anyone with an animal on the issue ourselves.

I called Security, and they came to talk to the guy. He left without an issue, and was apparently embarrassed more than anything else. I felt like I really bungled the whole situation, but my boss had nothing but kind words for me when she got back. She told me one of the reasons she felt comfortable leaving for so long was that she trusted me to enforce policy, whether I knew it off the cuff or called someone to help clarify. So I kicked the cat out of the library, but it was for a good reason and everyone involved learned a valuable lesson about campus policy.