Lou Rosenfeld is an independent information architecture consultant, and founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media, a publishing house focused on user experience books. He has been instrumental in helping establish the fields of information architecture and user experience, and in articulating the role and value of librarianship within those fields.

As a graduate student in library and information studies in the late 1980s, Lou became convinced that the skills of librarians were grossly undervalued — in the coming information explosion, who else would supply the skills of organizing, classifying and labeling information?

As the Web sped that explosion along, Lou realized that additional skills and perspectives were required to develop coherent, intuitive structures — information architectures — that made web content accessible to users. At Argus Associates, a pioneering consulting company that Lou co-founded in 1991, those additional perspectives — usability engineering, ethnography, technology analysis and others — were successfully folded into the mix, and the company became perhaps the best-known firm in the field of information architecture.

Lou served as Argus' president from 1994-2001. Named a "Technology Pioneer" by Crain's Detroit Business, Lou has consulted for such organizations as Paypal, Accenture, AT&T, Caterpillar, the Centers for Disease Control, Ford, and Microsoft.

With Peter Morville, Lou co-authored the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly, 1998; second edition, 2002; third edition, 2006), Amazon.com's "Best Internet Book of 1998." With over 150,000 in sales, it has been acclaimed as a classic and is used as a standard text in many graduate-level classes. His newest book, Search Analytics for Your Site, was published by Rosenfeld Media in June of 2011. Lou has contributed regular columns for CIO, Internet World and Web Review magazines, and has written and edited numerous other books, chapters, and scholarly articles.

Lou has participated heavily in efforts to coalesce the information architecture and user experience communities. He is co-founder and past board member of the IAI, the Information Architecture Institute, the sole professional organization of information architects. Lou played a leading role in organizing and programming the first three information architecture conferences (the 2000 and 2001 ASIS&T Summits and ACIA 2000) and continues to serve on the Summit's program committee. He is co-founder and current president of UXnet, an organization that supports cooperation and collaboration among UX-related organizations and individuals. And Lou serves or has served on advisory boards for the Content Management Professionals group, the AIGA Experience Design Community, the Interaction Design Association, and UX Matters magazine.

Lou has presented and moderated at dozens of professional and academic events, and has taught popular tutorials for the Nielsen Norman Group. Each year since 2002, Lou has embarked on a six-city speaking tour with usability expert Steve Krug; Lou also teaches in-house seminars.

In 1993, Lou founded a popular Internet research service, the Argus Clearinghouse, an early and successful demonstration of the application of librarianship to making Web content more accessible. And while at the University of Michigan, Lou designed and co-taught some of the first academic courses that dealt specifically with designing information for access on the Internet.

Lou holds a Masters in Information and Library Studies and a B.A. in History, both from The University of Michigan. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Mary Jean Babic, and their children, Iris and Nate.