[Sigia-l] Dreaming of a career in IA: Any advice welcome!

[Sean Lawrence]

Greetings Ariel!

With a background in Urban Planning, I think you have a solid academic
background.  IA is, essentially, planning for the Web in many of it's
manifestations.  Personally, I have a strange notion that GIS and IA will be
an interesting point of convergence in the near future with GPS enabled
Mobile Phones, PDAs, laptops, Wireless hotspots, etc.  Anyone hear have that
same feeling?  So I would say get the MLIS, and perhaps look in to taking
any classes dealing with cartography, indexing, and findability, if they are
offered.

As far as having development experience, almost none of the IA's I know have
any coding background and come more from a content or design background.
I'm currently a systems analyst trying to get back in to IA.  I think having
an understanding of the uses of different technologies and their application
is definitely a plus for anyone the Web, professional services fields
nowadays.

I would really like to know if more folks do predict a GIS/IA convergence,
though.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Sean