With Roy’s gracious permission, I am going to hijack TechEssence briefly to canvass its readership about a potential conference-related set of online-only tutorials and workshops. If you couldn’t be more horrified by the idea, pray accept my apologies for disturbing you and go on to the next post.

I was just added to the planning committee for the code4lib 2007 conference. I would very much like to organize some online-only tutorials and workshops, combining asynchronous (email, blogs, wikis, bulletin boards, podcasts, vidcasts) and synchronous (chat, perhaps VOIP or webcasting) communication.

These would be short (no more than one week in length), focused, individual- rather than group-oriented workshops. Participants would leave each workshop with a new library-technology–related skill, competency, or understanding. Attendance at code4lib 2007 would not be required to participate, and participants would be welcome to take as many workshops as they please.

I hope to be able to offer them on a sliding fee scale, to attract participants who do not have travel or professional-development funds. Suggestions for a fair way to determine appropriate fee levels welcomed.

The major question is what topics potential participants feel could be profitably taught or workshopped in this format—and I invite answers both specific and general in the comments! I envision:

• installfests (social software, proxy software, institutional-repository software, etc.)
• guided experiments with configuring and using software
• “what is _____ anyway?” (please supply intriguing values of _____)
• intensive technology-planning work
• web-design tips and techniques, perhaps even “markovers”
• acronym demystification
• solving specific, limited programming problems

So now it’s your turn. What that I mentioned sounds interesting? What sounds interesting that I didn’t mention? If you would rather not comment here, feel free to get in touch with me by email at dorothea(at)textartisan(dot)com, or on AIM at DorotheaSalo.

I am not actually a very good information architect. Well, I’m not actually an information architect at all. So pontificating about information architecture would be more than a little presumptuous of me. Instead, I’ll recommend you some of the books and websites I’ve read, liked, and used. I hope they’ll get you started.

The nice thing about books in this area is that they’re not stuffy, they’re (mostly) not geeky, and they’re not hard to understand. It’s more than just that these people know how to organize information (though that certainly doesn’t hurt!); information architects tend to be clever, engaging writers.

My first recommendation isn’t an information-architecture book at all. It’s Donald A. Norman’s seminal The Design of Everyday Things. This fantastic book will open your eyes to the value and use of good design, the insights necessary to make correct performance of a task seem natural. You’ll never look at a simple doorknob the same way again. It’s a “why” book rather than a “how” book, but honestly, I think librarians have as much trouble with the “why” of usability as the “how” sometimes.

Another “why” book (that does contain some “how” as well) is Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Its title will unfortunately not commend it to librarians, but I do encourage you to give it a chance anyway. Funny, plentifully illustrated, and thought-provoking.

The nuts-and-bolts how-to handbook of information architecture is by librarians Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. It is unpretentiously titled Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and has a large friendly polar bear on the front cover. (Calling it “the polar-bear book” will earn you geek cred with your favorite geeks. Never mind why.) If you only have time for one book in this list, make it this book.

My oddball recommendation, a bit geekier than the others, is Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. This book talks about why your average programmer is the last person you want designing software or websites; programmers design to make their development job (rather than the user’s job) easier. The chief take-away is Cooper’s discussion of “personas,” imagined typical users who help bring usability discussions back to earth. A measure of how much I like this book is that I recommend it despite its abysmal web-”inspired” book-design and typography.

I confess that I haven’t found time to read Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability yet; I invite reviews in the comments. I respect Morville enough to recommend the book sight unseen, however.

Useful websites for would-be information architects and web designers include Boxes and Arrows, A List Apart, and the websites of the authors I’ve listed. Also check out what the design firm Maya did for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, because the techniques they used bring web design together with physical-space design in intelligent and fruitful ways.

Read, learn, design!

My local public library has a survey up about its website. I took it. I was, shall we say, not complimentary (though I was constructive). My local public library’s website requires four clicks at the least just to get to a catalog search box.

I’m guessing your library’s website isn’t quite that bad. Still, one of these days you’ll be reworking it, and that’s a scary, scary project. How do you even get started?

This post isn’t about the social process of reworking a website—the focus groups, the committee meetings, the CMS RFPs, and all that. This post is about how you figure out what you’ve got, and what you do with it to get it ready for the next steps toward a managed, standards-compliant, accessible redesign.

Unmanaged websites, as many library websites are, “just grow” to an astonishing number of pages. Many of the pages will look different from each other, sometimes wildly different. Many will be obsolete, in content or code or appearance or all of these. Some will be undiscovered gems that deserve inclusion or even more prominent placement in the new site. How do you know? How do you even find everything? You may not have FTP access to the site!

You can click links and do Save Page As… until your index finger wears out, but that’s the hard way. Get a web crawler to collect everything for you. That’s the easy way. I like HTTrack for Windows users; on my Mac, I use the wizzy and very cool SiteOrbiter. (Feel free to suggest others in the comments.)

You’ll have to dig about in the preferences a bit to make sure the crawler doesn’t suck down offsite links, but other than that, you can turn it loose and it will obediently recreate your library’s site on your hard drive.

Next step? Weeding. Just like collection weeding. Go through every single page and wipe out the ones you know you don’t want any more. Don’t worry about dead links. Don’t worry about reorganization. Just kill obsolete and not-useful information. Also kill “link-farm” pages, pages that exist only to link to other pages on your site. That’s site organization, information architecture, and you’ll deal with that much later in the redesign process. (I would be tempted to kill link-farms to external sites also, but that’s a judgment call you’ll have to make for yourself. Just keep in mind that static pages are probably the worst way to manage linklists; they get stale quickly and they’re annoying to re-edit. Use a wiki, bookmarking service, or database-based web application instead!)

With any luck, the weeding process will leave you with a pile of pages that almost starts to look manageable. Make a list of the remaining pages with brief descriptions of what’s on them; this will come in useful for card-sorts and other information-architecture techniques that you will use to put your new site together.

Next, you want to strip as much design as possible out of these pages, leaving only pure, sweet information with a sprinkling of powdered HTML markup. Don’t do this in Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Start out with some permutation of HTML Tidy (try out a web-service version to see what the fuss is about) to eliminate the worst problems, and then work in a text editor.

Be ruthless. Layout tables, gone. Font tags, gone. Pretty imagemaps, gone. Colors, gone. “Navigation,” gone. Javascript, gone. CSS (if any!), gone. Even “structural” divs and spans (if you’ve had a really enlightened web designer all these years) can likely go. All of this is going to change in the redesign, so start fresh! You want to end up with headings, paragraphs, lists, blockquotes, informational images, maybe a data-table or two—and that’s all.

Yes, it all looks horrible when you’re done—but it’ll slide smoothly into your new site later, and that’s what counts.

Future posts on this theme will talk about basic information-architecture tools and techniques, and perhaps one of my TechEssence colleagues will tackle content-management systems since I am in no way competent to. Please ask any questions you have in the comments!