ABSTRACT
Information architecture has become one of the latest areas of excitement within the library and information science community, largely resulting from the recognition it garners from those outside of the field for the methods and practices of information design and management long seen as core to information science. The term information architecture (IA) was coined by Richard Wurman in 1975 to describe the need to transform data into meaningful information for people to use, a not entirely original idea, but certainly a first-time conjunction of the terms into the now common IA label. Building on concepts in architecture, information design, typography, and graphic design, Wurman’s vision of a new field lay dormant for the most part until the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, when interest in information organization and structures became widespread. The term came into vogue among the broad web design community as a result of the need to find a way of communicating shared interests in the underlying organization of digitally accessed information.
