Information Architecture Principles: Use in a Library Setting

My first impressions were that is a glorified chat room. Which is unfair, but that’s how it felt. You can chat in realtime with your contacts, to the point of even seeing their text as they write it.

However, that aside, it does have some great collaboration features. You can edit messages, both your own and other’s, which is useful but at the moment it is hard to know what was edited. The authors details change to include the names of everyone who has edited that message, but there is currently no way of knowing what they edited or what the text was previously.

It does have potential as a collaboration tool. You can attach files and images to messages as well as maps and other gadgets such as a voting tool. There is also a Sudoku gadget you can play if you’re that way inclined!

Personally, I don’t have any use for it at the moment. I wish I had had access back when I was at university, and completing group assignment after group assignment. It might have made communication that much easier.

For now though, I will keep experimenting and watching with interest any changes they make.

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

I don’t think I have ever snacked whilst reading – my fingers would get dirty and then I wouldn’t be able to touch my book! I do on occasion have a drink whilst reading though.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

The idea of writing on my books horrifies me! But on the other hand, I love finding old books with notes in margins and underlines everywhere. If I need to remember something, I’ll put a post-it note in the book.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Bookmarks. I own a rather large collection of bookmarks. I could never lay a book flat open – I love my spines to be pristine. I’ve even gone so far as reading a book keeping it open as little as possible so as to not crease the spine.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?

Fiction mostly. I’d love to read more non-fiction, but I always get so distracted reading them, even when it’s something I’m genuinely interested in.

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Hard copy – I tend to tune out noise really easily, and I find that my mind wanders and I’ve missed half a chapter when I’m listening to audiobooks.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

I can stop anywhere.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

No – usually the meaning is made clear by the context, or it is explained a little further along.

What are you currently reading?

Currently I have 4 books on the go which is unusual. I’m reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco but it is currently on hold while I read The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt. I’m also reading a short story anthology called Extraordinary Engines and I’m reading Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler as it’s handbag sized!

What is the last book you bought?

The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – they’re both Booker Prize nominees.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

I can have multiple books going at once. Normally I only like to have one or two, but as you can see from above currently I have four! I use the DailyLit service a lot so often I will have one hardcopy book and one DailyLit book going at once.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

These days I tend to read most when I’m travelling to and from work. I can’t read in bed at all, but when I was younger I used to have a beanbag that I spent most of my reading time in.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

I like series as you get to spend more time with characters you like. But I will quite happily read stand alone books.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

Neil Gaiman. Although as time goes on there are fewer and fewer people who haven’t heard of him, so I shall have to find a new author soon!

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

Mostly by author alphabetically by last name. Though cookbooks are separate and not really organised at all. And there’s a big section that is organised by size. These books tend to be non-fiction hardbacks or graphic novels. Or simply too big to fit in with the rest of the paperbacks.

In other news, I’ve written an article which should be appearing in FUMSI soon. It’s about using IA principles in your library and I’ll link to it when it is published.

In the meantime, keep your eyes open for a complete revamp and relaunch of Enquiring Minds coming soon to screen near you.

As librarians we are involved in both finding information, and in making that information easier to find for others. We are experts at structuring information in ways that make it easy to find and use. In the legal sector particularly, we’re often also involved in creating and maintaining taxonomies which feeds back into the previous sentence – we’re structuring knowledge so that it’s easy to find and use. And both IA and UXD are about the same thing – structuring information. There is more to it than that of course, but really that’s what it comes down to.

So why aren’t there more librarians involved in the field? Is it because we lack the techy/web skills? I don’t think it’s that as I know many many librarians just as skilled in that area. So I think that maybe it’s because there is a lack of awareness that this kind of role exists. So in an attempt to rectify this fact, below is a list of resources, blogs and other websites that I’ve found incredibly useful recently.

Enjoy!

Websites

The Information Architecture Institute – a great place to start, has a fantastic library section.

UX Booth – Complete Beginners Guide to Information Architecture – Another great introduction and overview.

IA Summit – This conference was on earlier this month, but even just reading the program summaries is a good way to get familiar with the issues of interest to the community at the moment.

Webcredible IA training

Grace Smith – Wireframing All in One Guide – Great intro to Wireframing

Jesse James Garrett’s IA articles and resources

Digital Web Magazine articles on IA

Boxes and Arrows – Great site covering topics such as wireframing, IA, UXD and more.

Blogs

Konigi –  covers IA, UX and other topics of interest

IAPlay – UK based blog and site with links to lots of useful resources.

Adaptive Path Blog – Adaptive Path is a company that specialises in Experience Design.

Wireframes Magazine – All about wireframe techniques and tools.

User Pathways – Blog of James Kelway covering IA, UXD and general web design.

Findability.Org – Peter Morville co-wrote the original Polar Bear book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Oh, and he’s a librarian

Tools/Resources

Lovely Charts – excellent web based wireframing tool, perfect for when you don’t have access to Visio or similar software.

Omnigraffle/Visio – two pieces of software that are great for creating mockups, wireframes and flow charts. If you have access to them, have a play! Otherwise it’s probably best to stick with Lovely Charts above, or simply use PowerPoint.

IA Institute list of tools - various tools, papers and presentations.

Konigi Graph Paper templates – Graph paper that’s designed for use as wireframes and storyboards.

ACIA Information Architecture Glossary – from 2000, but still a useful guide to key terms.

In fact I’ve just discovered that the Guardian has an entire section devoted to articles on Twitter. Definitely a page to keep track of.

I think Yammer have a good idea, addressing many concerns within business about confidentiality etc and I will be interested to watch and see how it progresses.

spearhead the development of the Free Legal web — a service that joins up the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web and delivers a useful service to both lawyers and the community at large. I need a commitment from a handful of others with complementary skills and expertise to kick-start the project. All suggestions are welcome and necessary to drive this forward.

The goal is to create a ‘joined-up’ free legal web, in some way making accessible all the officially provided free information (opsi, hansard, etc) as well as blogs, legal wikis, and other free available, but ‘unofficial’ sources of legal information. All in all a very laudable goal, I must say.

This is in line with the goals of the Power of Information Task Force,who are working to public sector information more accessible to the people. (There’s even a £20k prize if you think of something they really like!)

I think that at it’s core this is a really good idea – I’m all for making information more accessible, and taking some of the control away from the legal publishers, who currently hold the legal sector to ransom for their ‘official’ information sources. As Nick says in his manifesto, legal blogs and wikis are producing some fantastic commentary and discussion on legal issues, and are far more timely and accessible than journal articles and books. And it would be great to have a central location for accessing, searching and disseminating information from both the ‘official’ and ‘non official’ freely available legal sources.

The big question that hangs over the project though, is how is it going to be done? Will it simply be a portal site (though this ground is already covered very competently by Nick’s excellent Infolaw.)? A federated search engine? A mashup of rss feeds that you can set-up according to your own interests?

I think this is a fantastic opportunity to make use of semantic web style metadata. I don’t really know enough about the semantic web to start having an intelligent discussion about how it would actually work in practice but a semantic metadata powered search engine/giant mash up might be an idea? A quick web search reveals a number of discussions already in place regarding the construction of legal ontologies for semantic web markup.

A cohesive effort to get people using a shared ontology and semantic markup for the pages would be a great step forward, and would hopefully start paving the way for future (free) uses of legal information on the web.

Lots of concerns spring to mind too though, not the least some very disgruntled legal publishers. The sheer volume of (presumably) volunteer effort will make it a slow going process. Getting the combined online legal community on board might also be a challenge. And getting everyone to come to a decision? Fraught, but not necessarily impossible.

This is a very off-the-cuff response to what is a very ambitious and multi-faceted plan. I’m sure given more thought I’ll be able to think of many more things to say about it. I do, however, think it’s a great and very laudable idea, and am looking forward to seeing how the project progresses!

It seems to be very public oriented, looking at broad, thematic areas such as music, crime and punishment, travel and tourism. They’re hoping that they’ll get researchers to use it as well (though why they wouldn’t use the sites/databases of the primary providers is a bit beyond me), but it is primarily aimed at the ‘interested public’, whoever they are.

It’s being funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, which is a programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable, which is a laudable, if rather vague goal. The project is being run from the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and has partner institutions throughout the rest of Europe.

The idea is that it will just be a portal site, with federated search across all the member organisations collections, and with the complete digital object staying on the site it belongs to – the Bundesarchiv or British Library, for example.

I think it’s kinda a neat idea – digitisation is a good idea, at least from an archival point of view, if nothing else – but I’m not entirely convinced that it will be used. I expect it’ll end up languishing, like much of the public-oriented Europa sites, unnoticed, unusable and neglected. I don’t really know who they’re aiming it at – they might get a little further, and make it a little more practical if they did just aim the project at the researchers and academics that are far more likely to use it, rather than pretending that there is this great public desire for digitised historical documents. The public should certainly have access to such things, but it isn’t really high on the agenda for your average European citizen.

It might behoove the Commission to think a little more about who they’re marketing these things to, and how to market it appropriately, before spending all this money on projects that no one will use.