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I am not actually a very good information architect. Well, I'm not actually an information architect at all. So pontificating about information architecture would be more than a little presumptuous of me. Instead, I'll recommend you some of the books and websites I've read, liked, and used. I hope they'll get you started.

The nice thing about books in this area is that they're not stuffy, they're (mostly) not geeky, and they're not hard to understand. It's more than just that these people know how to organize information (though that certainly doesn't hurt!); information architects tend to be clever, engaging writers.

My first recommendation isn't an information-architecture book at all. It's Donald A. Norman's seminal The Design of Everyday Things. This fantastic book will open your eyes to the value and use of good design, the insights necessary to make correct performance of a task seem natural. You'll never look at a simple doorknob the same way again. It's a "why" book rather than a "how" book, but honestly, I think librarians have as much trouble with the "why" of usability as the "how" sometimes.

Another "why" book (that does contain some "how" as well) is Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Its title will unfortunately not commend it to librarians, but I do encourage you to give it a chance anyway. Funny, plentifully illustrated, and thought-provoking.

The nuts-and-bolts how-to handbook of information architecture is by librarians Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. It is unpretentiously titled Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and has a large friendly polar bear on the front cover. (Calling it "the polar-bear book" will earn you geek cred with your favorite geeks. Never mind why.) If you only have time for one book in this list, make it this book.

My oddball recommendation, a bit geekier than the others, is Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. This book talks about why your average programmer is the last person you want designing software or websites; programmers design to make their development job (rather than the user's job) easier. The chief take-away is Cooper's discussion of "personas," imagined typical users who help bring usability discussions back to earth. A measure of how much I like this book is that I recommend it despite its abysmal web-"inspired" book-design and typography.

I confess that I haven't found time to read Peter Morville's Ambient Findability yet; I invite reviews in the comments. I respect Morville enough to recommend the book sight unseen, however.

Useful websites for would-be information architects and web designers include Boxes and Arrows, A List Apart, and the websites of the authors I've listed. Also check out what the design firm Maya did for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, because the techniques they used bring web design together with physical-space design in intelligent and fruitful ways.

Read, learn, design!