[Sigia-l] re: Time for communications to take charge of your website

[Karyn Zuidinga]

After lurking on this list for a while, the discussion around departmental
ownership of the web site has drawn me out. For the last two years I have
been working on (and finally finished!) my Master's thesis. In it I examined
information architecture as an editorial process; specifically comparing the
role and activities of a managing editor of a magazine to that of the
information architect. As has been mentioned here, there are several
similarities in outlook and goals between the IA and the managing editor. It
has also been pointed out that on sites where the primary objective is to
sell something (e.g. Amazon) the similarities break down.

To me it seems like there are three areas of expertise in IA: structural
(site maps, content grouping, logical structure); functional (thesauri, meta
data, logistics, interoperability); and interaction (design, user
interface). I suspect we'll see specialization in IA, especially in larger
shops, much as we have seen in publishing where a large magazine may have a
managing editor, line editors, copy editors, and so on. In smaller shops,
like small magazines where there's one managing editor who does it all from
soup to nuts, we'll see one IA who covers the gamut.

Karyn Zuidinga, MPub