information architecture

The next print-out in my pile is from 2001. This article, Archives, Archivers and Achievement, is still available online at Francois Lachance's Web site. My print out was from the Teaching Online in Higher Education conference, although their archives don't appear to reach back to the 2001 conference. So why did I print out this article? This was a few years before I briefly considered going back to school to get a Masters in Library Science. I don't remember what it was that caught my attention back then, but this is what catches my eye now:

"The roles of curator, creator, custodian are congruent with the activities of describing, manipulating, and preserving information."

An archive can

• serve as a showcase
• serve as a storeroom
• introduce a triage dimension to pedagogical work & play
• serve as a gateway to other archives

The existence of an archive can

• be leveraged by an institution for marketing
• indicate institutional long term commitment
• demonstrate a judicious use of resources

The very idea of an archive does stretch the "anyplace, anytime" mantra
to include "anyone". But not everyone can serve anyone all the time and so
the goals associated with the construction of any archive will take on
their own local colour.

Do you have an archive of content on your site? Does it have a purpose beyond what's described by Dr. Lachance's article?

In 2002 I printed out an article from the now defunct Web Review. It was an article written by Lou Rosenfeld called, "Organizing Your Site from A-Z." The article doesn't seem to exist any more (nor does it appear to be archived in the Wayback Machine). The article talked about site indexes and gave the Adobe site (which also appears to no longer exist) as an example of best practices. Here are a few notes (and excerpts) from the original article.

A site index is an example of a Supplemental Navigation System (SNS). These systems provide an alternative to navigating a site via is main organizational system. The most common examples of SNSs are site-wide search engines, site maps and table of contents. There is no "right" SNS for every site as different types of audiences will have different ways they want to search for, and access, content.

Site indexes are similar to the manually-created indexes that can be found at the back of a book. They are typically long alphabetical lists of terms that can be easily scanned. Compared to the other SNSs listed previously, site indexes sort very "small" bits of information. Unlike a table of contents which shows only heading-level topics, site indexes show a full hierarchy of content. Site indexes do not show hierarchy (something that a table of contents does show) instead they flatten the headings and display major topics, and minor references all together. Site indexes support users who know what they're looking for and are technically easier to put together than configuring a search engine (although this doesn't necessarily mean it's less time consuming).

Steps to Creating a Site Index

1. Refresh yourself on who your site's users are an what their general information needs are.
2. Review your site and compile a list of content components you believe your site's users will find important. You may start by flattening your site's hierarchy into topics and then alphabetizing these topics, but don't stop there. Content components may comprise groups of pages in your site, individual pages, or sections of an individual page. You won't find the latter by simply looking at your site's table of contents.
3. Whack your list down to size. You want your list to be easy to scan. Maybe 30-60 entries is appropriate for your site, maybe more? Group entries where possible. For example: do you need to list MBA, PhD and Bachelor programs separately, or can these all fit under a single heading, "Academic programs"? If you have an extremely large site you may need to break the list into multiple pages for each letter of the alphabet. Make sure each of these sub-pages is easily scanned.
4. Term rotate. If your site index spans several pages, make terms easier to find by offering multiple "first letter"s. For example: "New Orleans Map" may also be listed as, "Map, New Orleans." Be conservative with term rotation so that it helps your readers instead of just making your site index longer than it needs to be.

There is no "right" way to create a site index, but there are several automated options for those who are using Drupal for their Web site. These automated tools do not necessarily allow you to index sub-topics within your page; however, this may be good enough for your site.

Drupal modules for creating human-readable site indexes include:

• Index
• Views
• Taxonomy Menu

There is also a Site map module which will flatten your Drupal site and give you a list of all pages contained on your Web site.

Sorting through a pile of old papers today I found a little stash of articles about the ways content can be sorted. It was neat to run across so many different ways of sorting information. Here's part one of what I found in the pile.

Information seekers pursue objects relevant to their tasks and apply task action steps to achieve their intentions. ... In planning a web site to present complex information structures, it helps to have a clear definition of the atomic objects and then the aggregates. Atoms can be a birthdate, name, job title, biography, resume or technical report. With image data, an atomic object might be a color swatch, icon, corporate logo, portrait photo or music video.
Information atoms can be combined in many ways to form aggregates such as a page in a newspaper, a city guidebook or an annotated musical score. Clear definitions are helpful to coordinate among designers and inform users about the intended levels of abstraction within each project. Information aggregates are further combined into collections and libraries that form the universe of concern relevant to a given set of tasks.
Strategies for aggregating information are numerous. Here is a starting list of possibilities:

• Short unstructured lists. City guide highlights, organizational divisions, current projects (and this list).
• Linear structures. Calendar of events, alphabetic list, human body slice images from head to toe, orbital swath.
• Arrays or tables. Departure city-arrival city-departure date.
• Hierarchies, trees. Continent-country-city (Africa-Nigeria-Lagos), concepts (sciences-physics-semiconductors-gallium arsenide).
• Multi-trees, faceted retrieval. Photos indexed by date, photographer, location, topic, film type.
• Networks. Journal citations, genealogies, World Wide Web.

These aggregates can be used to describe structured information objects, such as an encyclopedia, which is usually seen as a linear alphabetical list of articles, with a linear index of terms pointing to pages. Articles may have a hierarchical structure of sections and subsections, and cross references among articles create a network.
Some information objects, such as a book table of contents, have a drual role since they may be read to understand the topic itself or browsed to gain access to a chapter. In the latter role they represent the actions for navigation in a book.

Excerpted from "Designing information-abundant web sites: issues and recommendations" by Ben Shneiderman in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (1997) 47, 5-29