Review by: Dreier, Matthias (2005-01-12)

Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville are both information and library scientists. Having seen the internet grow in the late 1990s they realized that it takes more to design a large-scale web site than a content management system. The first edition of their book published in 1998 heavily influenced the emerging information architecture industry.

Defining “Information Architecture” (IA) is difficult. IA denotes to the work librarians have been doing for centuries: organising large amounts of information. Of course, designing a web site differs a lot from organising a library. Thus, the authors provide an entire chapter on how to define IA and what metaphors are appropriate.

The basics of IA are taxonomies, labelling systems, navigation, search systems, and thesauri. Each of which is addressed in a chapter of its own. The authors describe the theoretical background of each concept, the methods that apply to it, and the effects of good vs. a poor implementation. The chapter on thesauri, for instance, describes classic thesauri: a list of synonyms labelled as preferred, broader, narrower, related, and variant terms. In the context of web sites a thesaurus might serve as an A-Z index (rarely seen on the web although much more ‘user-friendly’ than a site map) or can be used to transform search queries. If a user enters a search term the system could search for synonyms as well or it could even correct common misspellings. Furthermore, a thesaurus also helps content authors to use a consistent vocabulary.

The book continues with insights on the IA in practice. Rosenfeld and Morville focus on the business context. Aspects of strategy, organisational issues, and ethics are discussed. It is, for example, difficult to calculate the return on investment of IA. However, there are a lot of cases where IA indeed paid off. The authors provide two detailed case studies: the Microsoft intranet and evolt.org, an online community platform.

The second edition of the book features a vast appendix of IA related books, journals, conferences, and web sites. Also, there are now chapters describing research and education in IA, tools and software used by IA professionals, and a completely new chapter on thesauri.

“Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” is a book full of practical advice for everyone who is involved in designing or maintaining a large-scale web site: designers, computer scientists, usability engineers, marketing staff and management. Rosenfeld and Morville successfully ran an IA consultancy until the web bubble burst in 2001. Much their experience – success and failure – are comprised in this book. It is not a scientific book on information science but a practitioner’s guide on structuring and organising large amounts of information.