Session type: Keynote

Farai will talk about how you and your manager can use your One-on-One meetings (1:1s) to manage change and unlock meaningful career progress.

We are IAs and We Matter

We live in the information age. Never before has the need for design, construction, and organization of information been greater. Never before has humankind needed people who think deeply about planning and designing information to make sense to other people.

That's where you come in. Whether you have the title "information architect” or not, you are responsible for creating systems of organization, classification, labeling, and structure. Whether you know it or not, if you are involved in making digital information spaces you play the IA role. And that matters. Your voice matters. You matter.

Let's celebrate IA and IAs and being able to come together in community. Let's pat each other on the back. Then let's get back to work and make sense of all those messes.

Connecting the Past to our Future: The Call for Resilience and Inclusivity in our Information Structures

As the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, which catalogs and manages over 179 petabytes of our cultural data, it is essential that the Library of Congress adapt, innovate, and continuously improve. Much resilience is needed to preserve the past and meet the needs of the present, let alone plan for the future. As information structures and data serve as the foundation for the explosion in machine learning and artificial intelligence, these structures and data also need to be resilient, accessible, and inclusive.

The library sciences are a foundational part of our digital history. In 1966, Library programmer Henriette Avram piloted the game-changing Machine-Readable Cataloging Record (MARC). In 2005, Peter Morville’s engagement with the Library of Congress sparked a change in how the Library centralizes access to our data and data structures. And in 2022, the Library released the congress.gov API to the general public, promoting transparency and access to the largest legislative data repository in the world.

Natalie Buda Smith will present this connection of the past to the present, and how building-in resilience, inclusivity, and accessibility prepares our fields for the work of the future.

Wendy will speak about how we continue to evolve IA as the entire design in tech industry matures and recenter around inclusive, people-first methods...