Started reading William J. Mitchell’s Placing Words: Symbols, Space and the City over the weekend and am delighted I purchased this book on a whim while Christmas shopping at Borders. This quote alone is almost worth the price of admission ($19.95 in paperback):
“The social and cultural functions of built spaces have become inseparable from the simultaneous operation of multiple communication systems within and among them. Architecture no longer can (if it ever could) be understood as an autonomous medium of mass, space, and light, but now serves as the constructed ground for encountering and extracting meaning from cross-connected flows of aural, textual, and graphic, and digital information through global networks” (page 19 ).
This quote immediately reinforced two thoughts that I’ve had floating around my head for a while.
1) That the Media-Upper Providence library (whose renovation/expansion I’m helping to plan as a board of trustees member), like all libraries these days, needs to engage with broader efforts to adapt public spaces so as to accommodate easy access to the many layers of virtual information being provided by the rapid expansion of digital communications networks. I would argue in fact that the role of libraries should be to actively model various ways of managing the intersection of local/physical context and global/virtual communications. By introducing ever new cross-over points points to their patrons–e.g., by including pointers in their physical signage to help patrons move seamlessly between the Adult Fiction stacks and online book discussions about the novels housed in those stacks–libraries can serve as multivalent portals between the physical and digital realms, empowering members of all classes of society. Rather than signaling a step away from libraries’ traditional role, this strikes me as a true reaffirmation and revivification of that role.
2) The use of the second term in the label “information architecture” is not arbitrary, misleading, or inaccurate, as critics like Mark Bernstein have argued. In fact, it is in many ways quite apt, especially if IAs move beyond (as they should, despite the uproar it will no doubt invoke from the architectural purists) providing schemas for navigating between web-based resources to tackling the challenges mentioned in #1 above–namely, the challenges involved in helping people move more easily and intuitively between physical spaces/resources and virtual ones. Again, this strikes me as being in many ways just an adaptation and extension of the traditional role of librarians, as media-agnostic facilitators of information access.
