Around the turn of the century, people trained to organise libraries turned to the web and started to make it findable. For a few years it had a name, a book everyone owned and a summit every spring. I was one of the people at those summits.
October 2026
Librarians had a great deal to offer this brave new world of networked information environments.
Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, 2000
I came to the web from language. I studied linguistics and literature, then wrote manuals and online help, and in the 1990s I was working on how people find their way through information. So when a book appeared that said the web’s biggest problem was not how it looked but how it was organised, and that the people who knew how to organise were librarians, it felt as if someone had described my job before I had a word for it.
The word was information architecture. It meant deciding how a website’s content is grouped, what each group is called, how people move between them and how they search. Navigation, labels, structure, search: the parts of a site nobody notices until they fail.
A book with a polar bear on it
The term was older than the web. Richard Saul Wurman had used it in the mid-1970s, in an article with Joel Katz called Beyond Graphics: The Architecture of Information and in a now famous address to the American Institute of Architects in 1976. For Wurman it was about making complex information clear, on paper and in cities.
The web version came from somewhere else. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville had trained as librarians at the University of Michigan and ran a small firm, Argus Associates. By 1994 they were teaching some of the first courses about the internet, convinced that, as they put it later, librarians had a great deal to offer. In February 1998 O’Reilly published their Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, with a polar bear on the cover. It sold more than a quarter of a million copies over four editions, and for a generation of web designers it was simply the polar bear book.
What it brought was the librarian’s toolkit, translated. Classification schemes became navigation. Controlled vocabularies became consistent labels. Thesauri and metadata became search that understood more than the exact word typed. None of it was new in a library. On the web, in 1998, almost all of it was.
A community with a name
For a few years the field grew the way young fields do: around a name, a mailing list and a meeting. The American Society for Information Science and Technology held a yearly IA Summit. In 2002 a group of practitioners founded the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, later simply the IA Institute. People put “Information Architect” on their business cards, and many of them, like me, had come from linguistics, documentation, journalism or library school rather than from computing.
In October 2005 the first European summit took place in Brussels. I was one of the people who helped set it up. It has been held every year since, in a different European city, and has long outlived the moment that started it. For a while I also taught Information Architecture to students of library science at the University of Antwerp, which felt like bringing the subject home.
You can watch the wave pass in Peter Bogaards’s InfoDesign archive, where he collected links on the subject by hand. His category for information architecture starts in April 2000. It runs to forty-one pages of twenty links. The oldest twelve cover the first three years. The most recent page covers six.
Where it went
Around 2005 the field began to change shape. Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati, writing its history a few years later, put it in one line: “As 2000 became 2005, things were changing again.” Users started producing content and tagging it themselves, phones and other devices joined the computer, and information architecture moved, in their words, “beyond the confines of the Web”. Their 2011 book called the new stage pervasive information architecture.
The name meanwhile faded from job titles. Most of the work went into user experience design, content strategy and search, where it is still done every day under other words. The IA Institute was dissolved in 2019. The European summit carries on.
What I took from that time is not a title but a set of questions. They are a librarian’s questions, and they still decide whether a website can be used.
The librarian’s questions for any website
- Call things what your visitors call them. The words on a menu are a vocabulary, and it should be theirs, not the organisation chart’s.
- Choose one way of grouping per menu. By subject, by task or by audience can all work. Mixing them in one list is what makes people hesitate.
- Give everything one home. A page that lives in two places has no address anyone can remember, and two copies that drift apart.
- Write down what goes where. A librarian calls it a scope note. On a website it is one sentence describing each section, so the next person files things the same way.
- Make search and navigation agree. If the menu says Prices and search only finds Rates, one of them is wrong.
- Test the labels before the design. Ask people where they would look for something, with nothing but words on cards. It is quicker than any prototype and it finds the worst mistakes first.
Read the originals
- Peter Morville, The polar bear book. One of its authors on the four editions of the book that started the web’s version of the field.
- Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati, A Brief History of Information Architecture (Journal of Information Architecture, 2012). From Wurman to the pervasive turn, by two people who took part.
- Peter Bogaards, InfoDesign, category Information architecture (2000–2021). Read it from the last page forward and you see a field arrive.
- Wikipedia, Information Architecture Institute. The rise and the end of the field’s own institution.