Information Architecture: Session 2

So we started a new week and a new session for my IA class. Here is an excerpt from the lecture:

Web Development Today

This is a broad topic. My intent though is for us to take a step back from the Web browser and desktop and put what we do as information professionals into a context (or perspective) that often gets lost in the rush to get projects done on time and within budget.

Not too long ago, Web site development was the sole domain of an organization’s IT department. As Internet usage increased, organizations started to allocate more funds to the “Web guys and girls” and soon enough new departments were formed with cool names like New Media, Interactive, and Online. Seeing the potential for increased communication power, productivity, and sales (to name a few applications), more traditional departments, such as marketing and human resources started to get in on the Web action as well. Before you knew it, an organization’s once novel Internet Web site [of mostly re-appropriated press information] quickly evolved into a useful and highly malleable extension of that organization’s mission, goals, values, image, and overall strategy for success.

Today, high-level, high-traffic Web sites/services are borne out of the integrated effort of every department within that site’s parent organization. It is the information architect’s job to think about, make sense of, and organize the macro and micro goals and requirements of all those departments into a cohesive and easy-to-navigate online space.

In your first critiques, many of you concluded that the assigned Web site, wor710.com was, more or less, not a very effective site based on its organization and labeling. These components are two of the founding building blocks of a site’s information architecture. And, as Rosenfeld and Morville write, “Information architecture happens, with or without information architects.” Decisions are made and Web sites take shape everyday.

Large-scale and high-profile Web site development is a highly integrated effort that involves the input of a diverse group of stakeholders. The WOR site however, was not borne out of such an effort. With no IT department, the station engineer doubles as the “Web guy.” So, if the site looks as if it was built as an afterthought, that’s because it many ways it was. Why? Simply put, the site is not a top priority within the company.

Using Krug’s ‘don’t make me think’ doctrine, you would never know from just hitting their homepage that WOR is the first radio station in New York to broadcast in high-definition (HD). I don’t know about you, but if my station was the first to do anything technologically new I would want to get that message across sooner rather than later. The fact is, WOR, while over 80-years-old, is one of the most technologically advanced stations in New York but, again, you would never know it by visiting their Web site.

One of the sites I have assigned this session is WABC 77AM's wabcradio.com. Why? In the last few years, WABC has become a direct competitor with WOR in the New York City/Tri-State market. While the majority of the two stations’ Web site content is categorically the same, it’s clear that WABC has put more thought into the structural design of their online content and overall Web presence. How though? Therein lies one part of your homework this week…

End lecture.

I also wanted to include a link to this diagram that we have to "absorb" this week. Is it called "The Elements of User Experience."

Escape from the walled garden (Library 2.0-style)

As you may know I (and a team of colleagues) have been re-designing the Utica College library web site. We have spent alot of time dealing with what I now understand to be information architecture, the way things are categorized, labeled and organized to be as useful as possible to our target user-the most unsophisticated undergraduate researchers.

Utica College, as an institution, recently launched a new content management system wherein all departments are locked into templates. This has largely solved the problem of design inconsistency for the institution, but it has also left little room for the types of design updates and innovations which we feel are important to our new site.

What we lack in "prettiness" due to some of these restrictions is made up for with what I believe to be an easy-to-use and highly functional site. The index page will include quick searches for the catalog, the e-journal portal and also a cool new database search created by our cataloger (and defacto systems librarian-thanks CP)

We were also going to include a library news section on the index page called "In the Spotlight." We haven't gotten to the real discussion of how this "In the Spotlight" area is going to be managed, but one of the issues that has arose is content update. We know we will need to update this section on a regular basis for it to remain relevant. To do this we realize we need to have full staff participation, but we also know that getting staff involved in the effort may be a little bit like pulling teeth. Assuming the staff may find it difficult to see some of things that they are doing as worthy of mention in a library news section. If we get little or no input from staff we end up making one person responsible for constant news updates(CP). Something we see as unmanageable and frankly unfair.

So I was reading this article from the awesome people at Talis regarding the issue of Library 2.0. The most important notion related to Lib 2.0 (as I understand it) is that to remain relevant to today's information searcher we must acknowledge the environment in which we now find ourselves. We cannot continue to exist in our own little password protected digital "walled garden," in our illogically "opaque information silos" if we hope to remain a relevant source of content for an increasingly sophisticated information seeker. In short, our data in long overdue for liberation from the shackes of the library card number and PIN.

Anyway, this got me thinking about the little digital walled garden that we were creating for our library. How could we liberate our data? One thing I think I understand is that this liberation is going to require coordinated effort from many people and the notion of expolding our catalog is simply something that we cannot do (at least now) because much of it is out of our control. In many ways we are at the mercy of our vendors, it seems that they are in control of these changes.

Well, what about this "In the Spotlight" section of the index? Could we do something with this to get us out of our private garden? Why yes we can. My thinking is that we should start a web log for the library that is a conversation between the library user community and the library staff. It would be very simple to create a blog with all staff members as contributing writers. We could then embed the most current bog posting into the "In the Spotlight" section with a link to the complete blog.

Doing this would solve the problem of having only one person responsible for content update, because everyone would have the ability to contribute with no mediation. It would also create a new and different (more casual and more familiar) space with which we could steer our users to our resources. I see no reason why we couldn't put links to the catalog, the e-journal portal, or any resource we see fit to include on the web log.

This new blog forum is flexible, there is no reason it has to be only library news. For instance, we could include mini-tutorials, links to sites that we have deemed appropriate for scholarly use, our own citation guides or pathfinders...the possibilities seem endless. Would this be the perfect escape from the walled garden?

We could create a new social garden for the library. Not only this we could also enrich the real library home page with links to pertinent postings in the right places to useful blog postings. Say for instance a staff member writes a mini-tutorial on how to find a journal full text. We could put a link to this posting on the ILL page or the e-journal page, or wherever we deemed appropriate. In this way we could plant little social flowers (in the form of links) in the walled garden of the library's "real" virtual space and vice versa.