Intranet Professional
Volume 3 • Number 6
November/December 2000

Information Architecture: Competencies and Capabilities
Roy Tennant, Manager, eScholarship Web and Services Design, California Digital Library

Information architecture is an occupation seeking to become a profession. Just this year the American Society for Information Science sponsored a conference to help define information architecture and to explore it as a possible new profession. Invitees to the “ASIS Summit” included Web managers, graphic designers, librarians, and information retrieval experts. The diverse group shared opinions, floated ideas, and occasionally argued over whether IA is a new profession or a meeting ground among the professions represented.

Happily, this is a question I do not seek to answer in this article. Rather, I will focus only on the skills, experiences, and personality traits that those who wish to be successful information architects should exhibit or achieve. Individuals interested in being information architects do not need to have all of these characteristics personally, but they should be prepared to fill in any skills they lack by working collaboratively with colleagues or consultants to provide those services. Additional information on the role of an information architect can be found in Chapter 2 of the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, by Rosenfeld and Morville.

[Complete article available in print] 

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