Over the past couple of months I’ve started doing quite a bit of research into the field of Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience Design (UXD). I’ve been busily designing site architectures and wireframes, and talking to others about the importance of both. And in the process I’ve come to realise that librarians really should be more involved in the area.

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.

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Well, it’s been a while since we last posted.  Jennifer and I are currently thinking about where we’d like to take Enquiring Minds in 2009, but in the meantime here’s a quick link to an interesting article on twitter: What are you doing? 

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.

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Not that we really post enough anyway, but I’m currently visiting over at Information Overlord, helping read through the Booker Prize nominees and waffling at length about books and themes and stuff. My first post is up now, discussing the lovely Secret Scripture.

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There is another Twitter clone about, but this time it’s for companies only. Yammer is a microblogging service that is arranged around companies. Sign up with your work email address and only people who work at the same company can see your tweets. You still have the same ability to follow specific people within your company so you have the choice of reading everyone within your company, or you could only follow those in your team. In addition, they already have a desktop app, a blackberry app and an iPhone app plus the obligatory mobile and IM updates.

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.

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There’s been a lot of chatter this afternoon on Twitter about Nick Holmes Free Legal Web project. Today he posted his manifesto (not as scarily Soviet-era as it sounds) that outlines the (rather ambitious, I can’t help but think) goals and dreams of the project. Nick’s ‘plausible promise’ is that he will:

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!

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The European Commission recently released a statement regarding Europeana - the European Digital Library that will be opening in November of this year. I haven’t heard much about this, but the plan is to build a portal to European digitized collections, allowing the public to have access to the historical riches of Europe. It’s quite a neat idea, but I can’t help but think that the goal of having “an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre” might be a little far-fetched.

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.

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I just watched an amazing presentation on the anthropology of YouTube delivered by Dr Michael Wesch. At nearly an hour in length, it is a bit of a time commitment, but is worth every minute.

Michael Welsch (who you may also remember from The Machine is Us/ing Us) from earlier this year) is a professor of digital ethnography at Kansas State University, and he and his students have been conducting an anthropological study of YouTube and it’s users. The presentation covers a history of YouTube through its users – from the Numa Numa song and it’s replicators as a celebration of the webcam, through to the endless mashups of Soulja Boy, to the Free Hugs guy. He also discusses the ways in which YouTube, in particular personal vlogs, allow for a form of expression and community that is unique to the internet, allowing people to make connections and express themselves in ways that they have not been able to do before.

Exploring ideas of authenticity, personality, self expression, participation and collaboration, this is a fantastic piece that really highlights the ways in which new media and new technologies are not only changing the ways people communicate, but are changing the communities we have, and for the better.

It’s not often that I find myself coming away from a piece of media feeling positive about the future, but this presentation made me hope that there is a future for our global community beyond lots of individuals sitting in front of boxes.

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I know we’ve been incredibly quiet of late, but I promise that we will be back soon with actual posts! 

In the meantime, in the process of updating and weeding my feeds, I’ve realised that I have a distinct lack of feeds that relate to my current work.  So, does anyone have any suggestions for some good KM or Intranet related blogs?

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Jennifer and I have both started new jobs recently, which explains our radio silence lately. As a result of changing jobs however, I’ve realised that my information needs have changed. Both because of a lack of time and because of a change in roles.

As a result, whenever I do get a chance to sit in front of my google reader, I am evaluating everything I read to determine how valuable the information is that I’m getting. In the past week I’ve unsubscribed from around 10 - 15 feeds, but my reader is still looking as crowded as ever so I may have to get a bit more ruthless.

I’m not just cutting work related feeds, I’m also examining the ‘recreational’ feeds I have. I have a large number of tech related blogs that I want to read but I always end up ‘marking all as read’ so I think it might be time to scale them back.

I’ve always had a large number of feeds as I’m always afraid that I’m going to miss out on something (a fear that meant I very rarely missed school and still hate missing work!). But I’m slowly realising that I just don’t have the time (or the inclination any more) to be on top of absolutely everything. If there’s something important happening in another blog, I’m sure that I’ll find out - either through another blog or twitter.

Basically, I’m trying to streamline my information sources. And hopefully this will help me get back into the swing of reading, posting and commenting again and not be overwhelmed by the numbers in my reader!

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I’ve finally gotten around to watching a video that I’ve had saved in my google reader for weeks - We Think.  (Found via Web 2.0 (Video/Powerpoint))

It’s an animation that accompanies a book that was published in the UK recently, also titled We Think. It’s about the web and creativity and sharing and where that will take us. Whilst not directly on Web 2.0 it is about the concepts and technologies behind it, and is about the direction that the web is heading.

The first three chapters of the book are available online here.  Go, read.  I know I will be.

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