Page 194 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Unit 10: Pre-coordinate, Post-coordinate and Citation Indexing

You can see this cultural difference between developer and user when you look at poorly designed Notes
interfaces. Both application interfaces and web site interfaces are the “face” of a culture presented
to users who may not be coming from a similar cultural background. Think of a senior citizen
getting his first computer handed down from his son, and wondering why there is a C: drive and no
B: drive. On web sites, the cultural gap is sometimes even wider: web site information architecture
brings politics into the mix, and whoever has the most power in the organization gets their material
out in front. The users are not part of the company’s culture, and often their opinions of what
should be easily accessible on a home page are lost in the politics.
Alternative access points like indexes are not used very often on web sites, due to several things:
• a lack of truly great tools that allow this work to be done quickly, easily, and flexibly, with
instant updating
• a lack of skilled people power
Web sites change and update too much to handcode such things as indexes. So if a company wants
an index on its site, they have to build a controlled vocabulary, apply it in an easy-to-use tool, and
take the time to pull terms as metadata into each posted page. (You can stop at a certain point: apply
terms down to a certain level, and rely on a mini search for really rapidly changing materials or
ASP pages).
Adding that data means dictating some field-filling to your content creators, and making that
vocabulary easy to use. The company also needs to build that vocabulary with an interface in mind:
knowing what the user will be seeing and navigating. The interface should come first, and then
design the vocabulary to fill it. That’s a lot of pre-coordinated work, and it doesn’t mention how
much maintenance goes into the vocabulary. That’s why there aren’t more real indexes on the web.
Search is so much easier to implement.

Back to the Index
We started out talking about indexing, and somehow, we’ve wound up discussing categories and
metadata instead. That’s where indexing is going. Traditional indexes work great for static information
contained within finite boundaries. But the boundaries of user assistance aren’t very finite any more,
and static indexing no longer works as well when your knowledge base keeps growing or changing.
This doesn’t mean indexing goes away. It morphs, and becomes controlled vocabulary or taxonomy
work or aboutness metadata. Pieces of larger vocabulary structures can be exposed as an index, or aid
a search engine’s work, or predict what labels a company needs for content management.
So it can be said that indexing skills are still important, for two reasons: 1) ensuring that your users
can have alternative paths of access to information, and 2) realizing that information becomes more
retrievable when it is tagged with aboutness metadata. Indexing keeps both your users and important
data from becoming lost.
Whether indexes will disappear or not depends on the amount of pain users are willing to endure
when searching, and the amount of time and money companies are willing to spend to make
information more retrievable. It’s hard to tell at this point, but I see signs that alternative access is
starting to make its case. Until we know, the best course is to keep your options open: learn what
you can about standardizing vocabulary, think about the interfaces in which you would like to
expose alternate lists and indexes, keep your documents tagged with a minimum set of metadata,
and keep an eye on what other companies are doing, especially those with money to spend on
development. If they start spending money on this kind of work, it’s because the pain is increasing.

Write a report on development of indexing concept.

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