Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Books

We’d like to have titled this category “Books and Magazines,” but information architecture is a new field and currently sports only one journal, Boxes and Arrows (http://www.boxesandarrows.com/). B&A intends to be the field’s “peer-written journal dedicated to discussing, improving and promoting the work of this community, through the sharing of exemplary technique, innovation and informed opinion.” With a star-studded editorial team and an excellent initial run, they seem an excellent bet to make good on this promise.

There are also precious few books dedicated to information architecture. But thousands of titles are relevant to the field, and perhaps hundreds merit reading. We can’t hope to narrow that list down to four or five, so we’ll instead rely upon an ACIA survey (http://argus-acia.com/iask/survey071801/071801index.html) we conducted in June of 2001. This survey tried to determine which sources of information the community used to learn about and keep up with the field. Among other questions, we asked which books information architects had read, and which they planned to read in the near future. We present the top answers to each question below. These lists are useful in that they provide a sense of what 107 of your peers are actually reading, if not what we would suggest they read. (It’s also worth noting that, except for titles no longer in print, each of these should be available via Amazon.com or your local bookseller.)

June 2001 responses to the question “Which ...