Information Architecture 2.0

Although I only spent a half day at ILI yesterday, this will be the first of several posts, so bear with me …

After giving my paper yesterday, I was approached by several people individually and asked to expand on what I’d said about Information Architecture in the 2.0 environment, and particularly on the gardening metaphor that I’d used. It was interesting to get different perspectives from people responsible for different sorts of websites.

My own thoughts on the matter started to crystalise when I came across this diagram on a slideshow by Michael Priestley. In it he expands on the basic model of the information atchitect responsible for navigation, the editor responsible for the content model and the taxonomer responsible for metadata (illustrated here). What I like about Priestley’s diagram is that it highlights the set-up and maintenance components of these three roles. The user is the one who is creating new content, while we, the people responsible for the structure and functionality of the website, tend, prune and train their creations into shape.

As a keen gardener, I can’t help but see a garden design metaphor here – we are landscaping, creating borders and weeding where once we simply built. Some of the people who spoke to me yesterday found this quite daunting – and one found the tendency of users to “put things in the wrong place” positively infuriating. I actually enjoy it. I like the way that users apply tags seemingly at random – it’s giving us data that was difficult to find before: how do people in our organisations actually describe the subject-matter they are dealing with – and where do they expect to find it?

In a way, this is all part of the old debate about whether librarians see their clients as central to their service or disruptive to it – after all, in the old maxim, every library is perfectly tidy until the users arrive! Perhaps the devil in me is delighting in seeing (and being on of) the webby folk having to deal with real users head on, where before we could just expect them to deal with what we gave them. And the nosey neighbour in me is simply fascinated by my colleagues’ differing views of the same organisation. Or perhaps it’s just that I like gardening.

However, I think the main thing that I like about the greater input from users that we’re seeing through 2.0 is what I can take away from the web side into the more traditional realms of my role – knowing how people structure their own information makes their behaviour in searching subscription online databases more predictable and easier to target for information literacy. And while people are structuring things as they do and assigning tags like “my documents” to a shared internal website, the semantic web seems that much further away – or rather, it will probably happen just as quickly as predicted, but our human logic (or lack thereof) will make it a million miles away from supplying people with all the information they need.