Exercise 3.10 -- Information Architectures

Information architecture is at the heart of what librarians do. DITA has taught me how to organise, categorise and classify information in a digital environment and teach users that a wide variety of search strategies must be employed to find what they need (Bates, 1989). Palfrey (2008) has highlighted how children born today have digital dossiers containing information on them before they are born, but being exposed to digital technologies does not equate to expertise in finding, managing and critically evaluating information. With the amount of global digital information growing exponentially, there will always be a need to guide people through it and collate disparate information into quality resources, so the role of a librarian shows no signs of obsolescence.

Organisation schemes are vital in collating digital information. Morville and Rosenfeld (2006) highlight the use of shallow hybrid schemes. An example is Leeds University's website, powered by the document-centred Jadu Content Management System. The site blendes exact alphabetical organisation schemes and ambiguous task-oriented schemes. Non-hybrid schemes are useful for subject gateways such as Intute, but not for sites like TARO where an alphabetical scheme has been used to classify topical and geographic information. Consideration must also be given to labels. Leeds University's site shows examples of ambiguous labels ('big ideas') and discrepancies and duplication in labelling ('Leeds and Yorkshire', 'Why Leeds?' and 'Choosing Leeds'.) This week's task of identifying a mystery vegetable shows how difficult it is to find information without consistent labelling: is kohlrabi a stalk, bulb or root vegetable or a brassica? For a user to find this information, it must be indexed as all four.

Felicitous information architectures will be organised to reflect their user's needs. A site without 'bells and whistles' is preferable to a visually aesthetic site offering disorganised chaos. Unfortunately, not all those creating and organising digital information are mindful of this fact.