Organizing Digital Information for Others by Maish Nichani. (ebook, no registration required)
From the description:
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!
The theme of delivering information to others cannot be emphasized enough.
Your notes, interface choices, etc., are just that, your notes, interface choices, etc.
Unless you are independently wealthy, that isn’t a very good marketing model.
Nor are users going to be “trained” to work, search, author, the “right way” in your view.
An introduction to be sure but this short (50 odd pages) work is entertaining and has additional references.
Very much worth the time to read.