LISNews: Librarian News

I really want to be a \"Senior Information Architect\" some day. What the heck does that mean? Well, it\'s kind of like a internet librarian, kind of like organizing the web, kind of like a really cool job title. I was cleaning up my ever expanding bookmarks and found This Old interview with Louis Rosenfeld. It\'s a really neat field that is perfect for librarians who are tired of librarianship, or are just up for a new kind of career.

\"Information architecture involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.\" \"This means that optimizing your site\'s search engine to help users find what they\'re looking for is information architecture (IA). Optimizing your search engine for effective load balancing is not IA. Developing a system of labels to populate the options in a navigation bar is IA. Determining whether the navigation bar is green or blue is not IA.

Why is information architecture important? Well, imagine that you\'ve just invested a few million dollars in your site. It\'s aesthetically beautiful, technically perfect, and full of wonderful content. But you\'re finding that users can\'t find the information they need, and that you can\'t determine where to put new content and when to remove old content. That\'s a pretty good justification for IA.