KnowledgeWeave

I’m in the process of packing and making final preparations to head out to the IA Summit, which I last attended in 2008, when I presented on the project described in these slides:

I’m happy to report as a follow-up to that presentation that the library not only has a new, WordPress-based web site–the maintenance of which the librarians have happily taken complete control of (so please excuse the cheesy clip art!)–but a Facebook page and Twitter account as well.  Unfortunately, with the downturn in the economy we’ve had to put our plans for the building renovation and the broader aim of integrating the library’s virtual and physical spaces on hold for now.  But I’m confident that once the library’s new fundraising efforts come to fruition, the framework we created to pursue that experience integration will come in handy.

I’m excited to see that several of the sessions at this year’s Summit–particularly this one by Luca Rosati and Andrea Resmini–will be addressing the topic of experience integration, or “pervasive IA” as Rosati and Resmini phrase it.  And I couldn’t agree more with this statement of theirs:

As every artifact, product, or service, is now part of a larger ecosystem  largely based on information, social patterns, people, and devices, IA has to become the connector between these different environments and contexts, and become pervasive.

As I’ve been saying for a while, the emergence of techniques for embedding information within physical objects–enabling the goal of “ambient findability,” to use Peter Morville’s now five-year-old (!) term–is going to open a whole new world of opportunities for the IA community. I’m looking forward to finding out more about how IAs are beginning to tackle the challenges that the latest developments in this area are bringing our way.