The latest issue contains an interesting conversation between various design thinkers and practitioners that makes reference to the emergence of information architecture as a field (http://nextd.org/02/10/2/index.html). I love this quote from Peter Jones:
“Information architecture was more of an activity before 2000, now it’s a well-defined field of practice making aggressive inroads into i-schools, (if not yet the d-schools)”.
Of course, from my perspective it is more that the iSchools are making the inroads into the IA profession but interestingly, the notion of an iSchool seems to have wider currency than some might imagine.