A chronological view of video games as a communications medium and a look at the factors that have had effects in the social, infrastructure, hardware and individual user levels.
[Note: I am trying out a new site called Slideshare which is sort of a YouTube or Flickr for Powerpoint presentations. The presentation should be embedded below]
Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries:
Beyond Traditional Authority Files
(G Hodge – 2000)
One thing I liked was this definition:
“A KOS serves as a bridge between the user’s information need and the material in the collection. With it, the user should be able to identify an object of interest without prior knowledge of its existence.â€
I like the notion that a KOS helps users find resources they’re not even aware of. I think that’s an important goal.
An impression I get from a lot of LIS people is a mild disdain for the web. Obviously the web is in many ways unstructured and can be difficult to use in ways that library systems are not. At one point the article states that “Someone recently compared the Web with a large room filled with books that were scattered all over the floor.â€
The description above is an example of the kind of lame metaphors this disdain fosters. If the web is a large room filled with books, it is the largest room that has ever existed; the vast majority of books are available virtually for free; and although they are scattered all over the floor, thousands of people will freely provide you with maps to find books on certain subjects, and everyone is provided with magical binoculars that let them see deep inside books and find a single phrase.
I’m not saying that bringing better standards to the web any devising better KOSs to organize web resources is bad, just that it seems like many LIS people take the existence of the web for granted.
One thing mentioned throughout this article is the high cost of indexing and cataloging or merging different cataloging schemes together. I think the costs may be exaggerated in some ways. For example, if you wish to catalog web resources for educators and for medical professionals, two groups that probably have different terminology for similar concepts, you don’t need to pay thousands of grad students to index everything under one, then the other scheme. Instead develop a mapping system that translates between the two types of terminology. The mapping system would be a big project and have to be very robust, but once it’s built it can run behind the scenes when anyone does any kind of searching. The article mentions cases where this has been done (with MESH terms, for example) but insists that it is a high-cost venture.
Similarly, what’s wrong with using the users of the indexing system as the workforce? Logs of search terms and phrases and how they are used together can be analyzed. Users can be tracked to see which titles or abstracts they click on when searching for certain terms, how long they spend at that resources, etc. Users can even be asked to rate resources and search results. If you are in the market for a hard drive or digital camera, I recommend you go to bizrate.com, pricegrabber.com, or any of a dozen services that allow users to rate both products and merchants, making it easy to find a good LCD monitor at a reputable dealer despite the massive anonymity of the Internet and the ease of creating fly-by-night stores or selling junk merchandise online. Something similar could be done to winnow out junk information and organize information resources.
I’ve done a lot of small freelance web development projects and I find myself explaining my approach to non-technical managers, small business owners, and other decision makers again and again. Here’s my attempt to write a more general document with a business perspective on web design.
Website design doesn’t just mean graphic design applied to a website. There’s a lot of work that should go into the project before anyone starts designing anything, and I think a lot of companies and web designers skip these steps and end up with yet another site that does nothing for the company.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is determine your business goals for the site and your various user populations and their goals. At this point you’re just brainstorming; later, we’ll figure out which goals are more important, which are most cost-effective, and figure out how your goals coincide with your users’ goals.
So let’s say, for example, that you have the following goals and user groups with their own motivations:
Business Goals:
User groups/goals:
Current customers
Current advertisers
Prospective customers
Prospective advertisers
As you can see, your goals do not exactly match up with your users’ goals, but there are many places where they overlap. For example, your current customers want to send in their files, and you want to reduce time and effort handling incoming files and in tech support. So that means the site should allow customers to send in their files as quickly and easily as possible.
In general, my rule is to look at the customers’ goals first, then match the business goals to them. If you end up with business goals that do no fall under any of your users’ goals in the end, you need to think about how you will market this goal to users or attract user groups that share that goal. For an (exaggerated) example, one of your business goals might be to sell an old backup generator. Right now that meets none of your users’ goals, so unless you attract different users you won’t be any more likely to meet your goal than blind luck.
The next step is to prioritize and quantify these goals. So perhaps we decide that we are going to get most new customers through face-to-face meetings with marketing reps and not through the web site. That means we can bump up all the goals relating to current customers to the top of the list. Or maybe attracting new advertisers is much more important than letting current advertisers pay online. So we bump “sign up new advertisers” up the list.
In order to quantify the goals, we’ll need to establish some measures and current values for them. So, for example, we want to quantify the “reduce tech support” goal. How can we measure this? Well, one measure is the number of people in tech support. This is a bad measure, though, and a common mistake–if laying people off is your goal, that means you can make create a poor website and still lay people off and meet your goal. Some better measures would be time spent per call, number of calls per customer, etc. That way your employees can be more efficient and handle more customers or provide better quality help. Also, always look at this from the customer’s point of view–why not measure how happy customers are with tech support overall, how happy they are with the help available (or not available) on the site, how likely they would be to use the site if they knew help was there, etc.
Once you have current figures for these measures, you’ll be able to tell if the site has really improved. Once we know our customers’ goals and how our business goals match them, and we have figured out measures for each, we can start planning how to meet them.
This was just an illustration, but this is the kind of process that separates successful web sites from mediocre ones. Keep in mind that this is just the first step toward a successful project, there’s still project management (planning the steps out and tracking milestones), picking the right technologies, designing the information architecture, testing usability, etc.
It’s a good idea to put together reports on each of these stages. This is something a lot of web designers and companies don’t usually do, but I think it’s important for a project this size. It keeps you aware of what’s going on, and eliminates duplicate work in the future.