[Sigia-l] IA=webmaster?

[Chris Chandler]

Welcome Rong Tan!

A good place to start would be the IAWiki:
http://www.iawiki.net/StartingPoints
This website has been created/maintained by individual members of the community and represents a very large collection
of information about what we do as IAs. Because this is a relatively new field, there are lots of debates about what is,
and what isn't "IA."

In my job as an IA, I do not really do the things your friend mentioned which have to do with "things." I work mostly
with people.

I work primarily on a creative design team responsible for a number of public web sites. I try to understand and balance
the goals the organization has for the website with the needs and goals of the people who are supposed to use the
website. Understanding the goals of the business is usually much easier (they want to make money -- they want people to
buy things, or at least agree to let us try and sell them things) Understanding the people on the outside is usually
much harder, and takes more time. Convincing the business people that they have to be sensitive to their
visitors/customers/guests goals, because on the web a person who doesn't see/get what they want right away can easily go
somewhere else is often the most difficult task of all.

For my team I usually create "wireframes" and "sitemaps" which are kind of like blueprints for how the information on
the site is organized, and I also make diagrams that show how a person would go from page to page in order to find what
they are looking for. Often I have to write many pages of documentation for the programmers so that they know how we
(the creative team) expect the website to behave.

Some other terms which describe what I do, but are not always part of IA are "usability" and "user centered design."

I hope this helps -- please feel free to ask more questions about IA here. People who do IA tend to feel passionately
about it, and are usually willing to discuss what they do in great detail.

-cc

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ì·éÅ TAN Rong" <rong_tan at sdu.edu.cn>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2004 4:58 PM
Subject: [Sigia-l] IA=webmaster?


> Dear members,
>   I'm a librarian in China, and I was majored in Computer Sciences for bachelor
> and master.  Due to some reasons, I left the software engineering occasion
> business.  But I still would like to find related jobs to do.  Now I'm looking for
> an area related to both my former major of computer sciences and my current job of
> librarian.  And I noticed the "IA" area of study.
>   Since I subscribed to this list, I've seen quite some postings providing job
> positions for webmasters or web designers.  Then I asked my former roommate in
> college still doing software developer job.  His reply gave me an insight to the
> IA concept: "For example they don't need to know how to program, but they need to
> know what a product can do and what a product can not do, what are the popular
> products for solving a specific problem, what is the industry trend, the advantage
> and disadvantage of a solution."
>   Can anybody give me some more professional idea?  Thanks a lot!
> Yours, sincerely,
> Rong Tan