Organizing Digital Information for Others
By Maish Nichani | 23 Feb 2012 Categorized under: Content, Information Architecture, Intranets
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When we interact with web and intranet teams, we find many struggling to move beyond conceptual-level discussions on information organization. Hours on end are spent on discussing the meaning of "metadata", "controlled vocabulary" and "taxonomy" without any strategic understanding of how everything fits together. Being so bogged down at this level they fail to look beyond to the main reason for their pursuit—organizing information for others (the end users) so that they can find the information easily.
Web and intranet teams are not the only ones facing this challenge. Staff in companies are finding themselves tasked with organizing, say, hundreds of project documents on their collaboration space. And they usually end up organizing it in the only way they know—for themselves. Team members then often struggle to locate the information that they thought should be in "this folder"!
In this short book, we explore how lists, categories, trees and facets can be better used to organize information for others. We also learn how metadata and taxonomies can connect different collections and increase the findability of information across the website or intranet.
But more than that we hope that this book can start a conversation around this important part of our digital lives.
So let the conversation begin!
Download for free
We're releasing this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
And no, we will not ask you to fill out a stinking registration form to capture your contact details. This download is a direct download. Enjoy!
Download Organizing digital information for others (7mb, pdf)
Short link to share with your friends and colleagues: http://bit.ly/yEyfFZ
By Yvonne Wong | Feb 25 2012
Hi Maish, thanks very much for sharing this book for free!
It is
definitely useful especially for people who are new to intranet/web projects and are new to these terms such as taxonomy, facets, lists, etc.
Your book will give them a quick overview of what these terms mean and what to take note of when organizing info in intranet/web.
If organisations hire consultants for intranet/web design/re-design projects, your book
will help in communications between an inexperienced intranet/web manager and consultants who use these terms naturally as are familiar with these terms.
Great work! Thanks for your spirit of knowledge sharing and it’s really wonderful to have you sharing such useful info in a book for free.
Will definitely help to spread the availability of this great book!
By Maish Nichani | Feb 26 2012
Glad you like it Yvonne. Hope to raise the level of the awareness between teams and external agencies and between staff themselves. This way we can focus the attention on creating useful products.
By Janine Weightman | Mar 02 2012
Thank you for this information! I’m creating a company knowledge base and I can’t wait to apply this knowledge to structuring the topics. There are so many subjects at my company and lots of personas…I think I have discovered the means to presenting the information to the audience in a way they can find it. Many thanks!
By Maish Nichani | Mar 02 2012
Janine: Glad you like it. All the best for your project!
By iphone apps | Mar 03 2012
Hi Maish,
Thanks for taking time in sharing such wonderful information with us. I am agree with you how people find difficulties in organizing the information.
By Avinash D'Souza | Mar 05 2012
Maish,
Just wanted to say that I LOVED this book!
I’m currently in the process of designing an e-book and I can’t begin to tell you how much clearer I am now in terms of how I think the architecture could be. Even though I’m sure this is not the intended usage for the book, it’s incredible how mappable the information is…
This publication is a winner…pity it’s not in a PDF format.
By Michael VanBruaene | Mar 09 2012
This is wonderful. Thank you
By Ken Reid | Mar 16 2012
Thank, this was a great read. It will be a big help in explaining to our SharePoint efforts to our managment team.
By Maish Nichani | Mar 16 2012
@Ken. Glad you liked it. Yes, SP is a versatile tool but takes quite a bit of tweaking to get it working, something that clients often don’t get, especially on the metadata part.
By web design surrey | Apr 06 2012
thanks a lot guys, thsi si really insightful stuff, working with legacy sites day in day out i get this all the time, especially when a staff member has left and no one can understand how they stored their files.
http://www.immersivemedia.co.uk