The paradox of the library: information architecture challenges in an interdisciplinary organization

• Authors: Abe Crystal
• Venue: DUX '05 Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Designing for User eXperience
• Year: 2005

This paper discusses field research in an interdisciplinary public health organization with a small in-house library. The fieldwork revealed how users in the organization often ignored the library (a "formal" information system) in favor of "informal" information sources such as colleagues, search engines, and personal files. The fieldwork thereby inverted a design problem, shifting the focus from building a better information retrieval system to understanding and supporting the information ecology of the organization. The fieldwork demonstrates some of the complexities of information use in practice, and the challenge of designing formally structured information systems (such as libraries) that match how users employ information in their ordinary work practices. We argue that future design efforts could build upon users' "natural streams of information" to develop more effective information architectures and capabilities for supporting users' work.