on Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, chapters 5 and 6

Morville and Rosenfeld (2006) enumerate the “challenges of organizing information” as follows: “ambiguity” (over labeling on websites), “heterogeneity” (of content of websites), “differences in perspective” (about proper organization, like determining association of content), and “internal politics,” (pp. 54-58). Since I continually move back to the context of libraries when thinking of IA, the applications of these ideas that immediately come to mind are based on experience at the University of Florida Libraries. As I’ve mentioned previously, I know the site I inherited and was responsible for maintaining certainly did a poor job of addressing the ‘challenges of organizing information,’ but to step outside of that one sub-site and to instead look at the library’s site as a whole, I’ve noticed the tension coming from internal politics. As the development officer and his staff have worked harder to increase donations to the library, I’ve noticed more real estate on the front page focused on that function; whereas in the past, the ‘giving’ portion of the site was buried in a different grouping that also included what is now labeled ‘services for alumni and friends,’; in addition to increasing the paths from the front page to get to the web content from that office, there has also been a heavy rotation within the ‘news and highlights’ section of the page of donations and fundraising information, (see http://www.uflib.ufl.edu). I expect the organization of these development areas and their place on the library’s main page are a function of the political will of the library administration, (to include the head of the Development office, as he is a dean and a member of the admin team).

I appreciate the explication of organizational schemes and structures in the writing of Morville and Rosenfeld—and I suppose most sites tend to toward using hybrid schemes; while I can see the importance of providing an alphabetical, chronological or geographical index to users, I suspect this would be considered only one way that users seek their destination. Again, I refer back to the UF Library’s site, where some of these organizational schemes are used but in order to enable faceted searching, not as the only entry point for searching, (so, in other words, an alphabetical index of all titles in the library isn’t the preferred method of reviewing what is available, and even in a results list, sorting alphabetically or chronologically is possible but isn’t expected as a primary search mechanism). Instead, I think like many sites the UF Library does one good thing in trying to anticipate the variety of approaches of users. I’m not certain how well this is done, though; as Morville and Rosenfeld (2006) write, “shallow hybrid schemes are fine but deep hybrid schemes are not,” (p. 68). I’m curious – could this account for why so many library websites are not very easy to navigate, if not outright impossible to use (fully and well, anyway)? Does this have to do with the variety of resources (in volume, and in volume of format) libraries seek to make available, and an insufficient way of organizing and allowing access to all of this information? As an almost aside to this, are libraries enabling user-tagging of materials in their collections, and if so is it possible to rely on user tags to drive searches? Are there other examples of successful user tagging, (other than del.icio.us and Flickr), and can we consider rating systems as a type of tagging (as used with StumbleUpon) or need it be based on tagging content with words?

I can see how labeling systems go hand-in-hand with systems of organization, especially as both should facilitate access to information. It seems that the rules for developing labeling systems follow in a similar fashion from those that would apply to methods of organizing: use appropriate language to meet the user at his or her level, remain consistent in labeling across the site(s)—to include not leaving gaps in coverage, as well as in maintaining even and consistent distribution of information across labels/categories.

References

Morville, P. & Rosenfeld, L. (2006). Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.