New course design: Classification schemes and information architecture

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Jun/Jul 2002 by Weinberg, Bella Hass

Special Section

VOCABULARY CONTROL AND DESIGN ON THE WEB

As Andrew Dillon's columns for the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology demonstrate, there are many definitions of information architecture. In consulting on a library automation system, I even heard a definition of information architecture that was coextensive with the field of systems analysis.

Seth Maislin points out correctly in Key Words: Bulletin of the American Society of Indexers (January/February 2002) that there are two sides to physical architecture: the functional and the aesthetic. A building may be efficient to walk through, but it may not be beautiful, or the converse may be true. The same two aspects apply to information architecture: A website may be attractive, but it may be difficult to find desired information in it.

The course described in this article emphasizes the functional aspect of information architecture, that is, the way content is structured rather than its surface presentation, in accordance with the approach of Rosenfeld and Morville's book, which serves as the textbook for the course.

The thesis of the instructor is that traditional concepts of classification theory are highly relevant to information architecture. Had it been in print, Sayers' Manual of Classification would have been the second recommended text for the course. Theoretical concepts were presented from the work of Ranganathan, but clarity was a major criterion for the selected readings, and Ranganathan's Prolegomena failed that test.

Context of the Course

Before going into further detail about the course, it is necessary to explain its relationship to other graduate courses in the program of the Division of Library and Information Science at St. John's University. Each student is required to take a core course, Organization of Information: An Introduction (formerly Introduction to Cataloging/Bibliographic Control). An elective course on indexing and abstracting has been available for decades. Several years ago, I designed a course called Language Structure and Thesaurus Development. Basic thesaurus structure is still introduced in the indexing course, but the variety of thesaurus structures is the focus of the newer course. In addition, automatic indexing and abstracting, as well as ranking algorithms, are studied in the thesaurus course.

Other elective courses on the organization of information are taught by Dr. Sherry Vellucci, author of the metadata chapter in ARIST (vol. 33, 1998). She teaches Advanced Cataloging, Technological Issues in Bibliographic Control, and Metadata for Information Professionals. During the Spring 2002 semester a Special Topics course entitled Building a Library Web Site from the Ground Up was taught by Brian Mikesell; that course included a unit on information architecture.

While many of the aforementioned courses deal with concepts of classification and hierarchy to some extent, none covers the full spectrum of systems and structures. A student in my indexing course once suggested that we offer a full course on classification. I kept this idea in the back of my head and acted on it when information architecture became a hot topic.

In a prior paper in the Bulletin (December/January 1999), I provided references documenting the failure of the paperless society to arrive. Two years later, in the medical library near my home, I observe numerous new textbooks and monographs being read by patrons. These printed works require a bibliographic classification scheme for arrangement on the shelves, at the same time that the categories of websites require systematic arrangement. Thus I decided to design a course that would examine these concepts in parallel. The course proposal was undergoing approval at the time that David Robins presented his survey of "Information Architecture in Library and Information Science Curricula" at the 2001 ASIST Annual Meeting; therefore, the St. John's course is not mentioned in his Bulletin article (December/January 2002). The accompanying box provides an outline of the course units.

Assignments

Early in the course, an exercise on Library of Congress Classification (LCC) notation was given in class. The combination of integers and decimals in the notation of this scheme introduces complexity in the arrangement of call numbers. Other notational systems have alternative arrangements (for example, all single letters before all double letters), but LCC is the scheme that most librarians are likely to use, and therefore extra time was devoted to its notation.

In preparation for their term projects, the students were required to do an exercise on depth of classification by analyzing the levels of hierarchy in a website devoted to a discipline and comparing them with a bibliographic classification scheme. The students found it difficult to find sites that presented a discipline systematically; most represented the society devoted to a discipline.

Students were also required to take a field trip to a library other than that of St. John's University and analyze the classified and form sequences of the collection. Among the aspects to be considered were