Access 2016

Academic libraries often struggle to find language and web architectures to reflect the services we provide and the work that we do. This results in a discrepancy between the reality of library space and service and the way in which they are presented on the open web. Often the core of what the library provides its users is articulated in expansive, catch-all “Services” menus.
The Web Team at the NCSU Libraries developed a structured content model and “user activities taxonomy” that allows us to dynamically align and present service elements around user goals rather than our organizational structures. Building off the success of this approach, we are developing additional taxonomies, driven by a user-centered ontology, to modularize more of our content in meaningful ways. An example of this is the “projects taxonomy” which allows us to better reflect work done by the libraries to external stakeholders, complementing the “user activities taxonomy” by expanding the types of content touched by taxonomic structures.
This talk will be on the process of establishing user-focused information architectures (IAs) through the principles of narrative taxonomy and will cover our application of user-focused IAs through the use of Drupal taxonomies. We will also address what this approach has meant for information presentation on the NCSU Libraries website, touch on the strategies used to garner stakeholder buy-in, and discuss the practicalities of how ontologies drive structural decision making.