November 3, 2007 9:18 am
Published by Fran
I have just read Eric L Reiss’ s book Practical Information Architecture (Addison Wesley; 2000). It seemed like a decent and sensible introduction to the subject, but it’s such a fast-moving area something written 7 years ago seems desperately old already. I picked up a few useful tips – for example it’s a bad idea to string several single word hyperlinks together, as people ignore the spaces and punctuation and assume it’s all just one big link and they also tend to ignore very short single-word hyperlinks, presumably because it is hard to guess what extra information the link will... Read more »
October 30, 2007 11:00 am
Published by Fran
At UCL David Nicholas gave an interesting lecture on The Virtual Scholar. He pointed out that people are apparently now happy to make major life decisions based on the results they get from typing 1.8 words into Google (the average for a search). The information society is not much good if no-one is actually gaining any real knowledge. Do diminishing attention spans mean that we are happy just to flick through a few headlines that confirm our existing prejudices? It’s an Eddie Izzard joke about being “thinly read” but don’t we still need some people to read more than just... Read more »
October 28, 2007 8:18 am
Published by Fran
Welcome to my new blog. I am just starting a Master of Research degree at University College London studying taxonomies. I am now getting pretty good at explaining what they are but I’m not going to do that here. Suffice it to say that if you think I am going to write about stuffed animals or the Inland Revenue, you’re in the wrong place! My first real encounter with taxonomical systems was during the 1990s when I worked as an editor of reference books, working on such titles as the Collins English Dictionary, the Macmillan Encyclopedia, and the Hutchinson Encyclopedia... Read more »