ia/ - Guidelines and best practices

IAI Summary Question 1: To Content Inventory Or Not To Content Inventory

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:49:55 -0700

Inaugural Question of the Week for the IA Institute Member Mailing List

Leisa Reichelt of Disambiguity.com posted earlier this month against content inventories, positing that they immerse you in the status quo of the content types and approaches.

http://www.disambiguity.com/2006/05/why-you-shouldnt-start-ia-with-a-content-inventory/

Her position is interesting, but we'd like to hear from you about how you react to this post. How have content inventories affected your process and creativity on projects? Is completing a content inventory as one of your first major IA tasks good or bad?

More IA Heuristics - Search

Fri, 03 Sep 2004 12:42:47 -0700

Lou Rosenfeld shares some more IA heuristics, this time focused on search.

Dublin Core 2003: Seattle, WA

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 03:53:25 -0700

The Dublin Core 2003 Conference is currently going on in Seattle this week. A couple of the attendees and I will be sharing our notes(and photos) when we've recovered(it's actually still going on). But until then, enjoy the conference proceedings online.

Web Design Practices

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 10:44:03 -0700

Heidi Adkisson is launching webdesignpractices.com this month. She has a sneak peek up for navigation practices (linked above).

Basically, the site takes her Masters thesis study of 75 ecommerce sites and makes it more accessible online. (For the impatient, you can download the 8mb pdf of Heidi's thesis).

I met Heidi at the IA Summit in Portland, and think that this will be a great resource for the community. I'm hesitant about considering common practice to be best practice (as gets implied in surveys like this), but it's good to consider if something really is a de facto standard, and what reasons your own project has for doing things differently.

Western States Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 05:30:19 -0700

The Western States Digital Standards Group (WSDSG) Metadata Working Group's best practices for using Dublin Core metadata elements is an excellent resource to consult when starting a project requiring metadata. The group came up with a set of guidelines for using Dublin Core during the development of a "Western Trails" digital library project. From the document's purpose and scope statement:

These best practices offer assistance in creating metadata records for digitized resources, both those that are born digital as well as those that are reformatted from an existing physical resource (photographs, text, audio, video, three-dimensional artifacts, etc.).

You can download the 1MB PDF from the Western Trails site.