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Information Architecture

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Defining IA (What is IA?)

Principles of IA

  • Information Ecology (32, IA)

    • Three components: Users, Content, Context

  • Search Types (44, IA)

    • Known item, exploratory seeking, exhaustive research, refinding

  • Information Seeking Behaviors (46, IA)

    • User methods for finding: searching, browsing, asking

    • Two aspects to seeking behavior: integration and iteration

    • Two models of seeking: berry-picking, and pearl-growing

  • Learning About Needs (49, IA)

    • Many research methods, but two primary examples are: search analytics, and contextual inquiry

  • Physical vs. Information Environment (58, IA)

    • An information environment should be reflective of the place it corresponds to (a physical bank vs. an online bank)

  • Modularity & Extensibility (67, IA)

  • Organization Systems (Ch 6, IA)

    • Organizing information is becoming increasingly difficult, originally librarians solely had the charge to organize information, but as everything is proliferated digitally, everyone becomes librarians (98, IA)

    • Heterogeny vs. homogeny (100, IA) (different things together versus same things together)

    • Use research and analysis methods to gain insight on how users group information, what labels, how they navigate (102, IA)

    • Organizing systems are composed of organization schemes, and organization structures (103, IA)

      • Schemes: defines the shared characteristics of content items and influences the logical grouping of those items

        • I.e. how things are organized (food in aisles at a grocery store) (104, IA)

        • Dictionary uses exact scheme

        • Grocery store uses ambiguous scheme

        • Examples of Exact schemes:

          • Alphabetical

          • Chronological

          • Geographical

        • Examples of Ambiguous schemes:

          • Topical Organization (newspaper)

          • Task-Oriented (Microsoft Word)

          • Audience-Specific (CERN: Students, Scientists)

          • Metaphor-Driven (Desktop: folders, files, trash)

          • Hybrid 

      • Structures: defines the types of relationships between content items and groups

        • Hierarchies - Top-Down Approach (117, IA)

          • Things should exist once, if they are repeated, they are considered polyhierarchical (118, IA)

          • Breadth and Depth

            • Breadth: refers to number of options at each level

            • Depth: refers to number of levels in the hierarchy

        • Database Model - Bottom-Up Approach (122, IA)

        • Hypertext (126, IA)

        • Free-tagging: aka folksonomies - hash-tagging like on Twitter, user generated (128, IA)

  • Labeling Systems (Ch 9, IA)

    • Types of Labels (140, IA)

      • Contextual links

      • Headings

      • Navigation system choices

      • Index terms

  • Navigation Systems (Ch 7, IA)

  • Search Systems (Ch 8, IA)

  • Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata

Terms

  • Labels - names given to things (ebay: “seller”, “buyer”)


Research

Strategy

Design and Documentation

Taxonomies

Resources

References

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