Book review: Information Architecture for Information Professionals, by Sue Batley

by Jennifer Smith

24 April 2008

In Information Architecture for Information Professionals, Sue Batley provides an excellent overview of Information Architecture, with particular focus on the aspects requiring the skills already practiced by Information Professionals.

If you’re responsible for helping an organisation make the most of it’s information, there’s a lot in this book which will help. While aimed at the Information Professional, it’s very approachable and perfectly suited to those who want to learn more about the theory and practise of Information Management.

What is Information Architecture?

Information Architecture is defined as: (1)

• the structural design of shared information environments;
• the art and science of organising and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability;
• an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

It’s an attempt to create order out of the information chaos that resides in most organisations. It differs from other attempts to organise information and IT by taking a more holistic approach, emphasising planning and structure.

The breadth of activities covered by Information Architecture, as suggested by the definition, underlines the complexity of how to make information easily accessible to those who need it, and the range of skills required to do it well.

Who is the Information Architect?

For your colleagues to easily find and access the information they require when they need it, someone will have to:

1. understand the needs of the likely users;
2. source the information they are likely to require;
3. arrange for the information to be available and, if paid for, negotiate cost-effective access, ensure subscriptions are maintained and probably re-negotiated annually;
4. to ensure that information is only accessible to the groups who should be able to access it;
5. organise the information so it can be browsed;
6. index the information so it can be searched and found by the terms likely to be used by the users;
7. design search functionality suitable for the likely skill level of the users, with the level of recall and precision required;
8. design the user interface to be aesthetically pleasing, clear and functional; and
9. build and maintain the technical network infrastructure in which the information will be stored and from which it will be accessed.

The range of roles listed above shows it takes a team of people from different professions working together to ensure easy access to information. The various professions may overlap in some areas, but none have the skills to undertake the whole process by themselves.

Information Architecture deals with the first step, and the fifth to eighth steps, but creating a satisfying and useful information access environment requires all the other steps to be completed. Information Professionals may only deal with the first six steps, and IT Professionals deal mainly with the final three steps, but all three professions need to work together co-operatively to ensure access to information.

Information Management aspects of Information Architecture

The book is arranged to follow the different stages of an Information Architecture implementation project:

• Preliminaries: understanding the user’s information needs by conducting information audits and user modeling.
• Search: what search functionality is essential and what is desirable, and the role taxonomies play in improving search.
• Information description: the use of metadata and indexing to aid retrieval.
• User interface: a good overview of the aspects which make up user interface design.
• Management and maintenance of information structure and content.
• Evaluation of the project.

Many of the concepts and techniques Batley discusses are already familiar to Information Professionals. What the book achieves is to show how these techniques can be used outside of the traditional Library or Information Service to bring the benefits of Information Management to a wider audience.

I found it particularly beneficial to see how the different Information Management techniques could be incorporated into an overall Information Architecture design. When learning techniques such as thesauri creation and indexing, Information Professionals often don’t have the opportunity to understand how to choose which techniques to use and how they operate together until they have to do it for real.

Other aspects of Information Architecture

Batley’s book benefits from concise explanations. It’s 200 pages long, and far more accessible than the classic text on this subject, Morville and Rosenfeld’s 500 page tome. Inevitably the concise nature of the book leads to a slight frustration with the limited coverage of some issues.

If you just read this book, you might assume all areas of Information Architecture are eminently suitable for Information Professionals. Perhaps this impression is caused by the book being written for this specific audience, but I would have liked Batley to put this book into context by explaining what areas of Information Architecture are not covered.

Having worked very closely with IT and design professionals over the past year to build OneIS, I’m acutely aware of the important contribution each makes in creating useful and usable online environments for accessing information. The skills of the Information Professional are undoubtedly crucial, but are best used when working in conjunction with these other professions.

Although IT is beyond the book’s scope, it would have been helpful for readers to have some advice on the issues to be considered when choosing software. User-interface design is covered, but I don’t feel enough is said to highlight the difficulties of this area and the level of skill required to get it right. The overview given by Batley should help Information Professionals and others to better evaluate user-interface design, but the design work itself should, wherever possible, be left to user interface design professionals.

Who is this book useful for?

Information Professionals

The book is aimed specifically at Information Professionals and would be an interesting and useful read for them. The Preliminaries chapter, in particular, provides useful material on planning an information-related project and on conducting information audits, of which there is a particular dearth of material. In addition, the final evaluation chapter is useful for evaluating any type of information project.

Everyone else

I don’t think the value of this book is limited to Information Professionals. For anyone interested in getting a grip on their organisation’s information, it provides a quicker introduction than Rosenfeld and Morville, and a more holistic approach than offered by the various IT-slanted books on Information Architecture for websites.

The Preliminary and Evaluation chapters contain good ideas for anyone managing or commissioning an Information Architecture project, and the chapters covering Information Management practices may be a useful introduction to these techniques.

As befits a University Lecturer, Batley has included comprehensive suggestions for further reading on many aspects of Information Architecture. Some of these suggestions are listed below together, with other resources I have found useful.

Summary

Information Architecture is an appealing concept and satisfying approach for anyone wishing to take a more holistic approach to solving information chaos. There is an increasing need for information management skills, and for an overriding framework through which these can best be delivered. As Rosenfeld and Morville state, “The post-Ajaxian Web 2.0 world of wikis, folksonomies, and mashups makes well-planned information architecture even more essential.”

It seems the more relaxed we are about information creation, the more sophisticated our information management techniques must become.