Taxonomy for Public Libraries?

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gstupar's picture

Can I invite you to share insight on your library website's TAXONOMY?

How is your website structured? Would you be willing to share the taxonomy you are currently using? Thoughts or advice on the process and how you collaborated with staff to create your taxonomy? I'd love to know how you got started with this aspect of your website's creation, and any information you can provide about training staff who are involved. Any resources, links, etc library specific that you can throw my way would be greatly appreciated. Please comment so that all can share the discussion, or, if you would like to contact me off-list you're more than welcome, gstupar@northbrook.info.

This is probably a huge, weighted question, but we're all librarians, and we're all about sharing, right? I promise to help with anything I can on this last as time progresses and I know more.

Thanks!

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Share the wealth

scolford's picture

Oh, I'd very much like to hear these responses too. We're currently stuck with a pretty crappy architecture based around buildings and departments rather than services and activities. We will be porting to Drupal in the near future and could use some help with this hugely daunting task.

Scot Colford
Web Services Manager
Boston Public Library

Glad I'm not alone!!!

gstupar's picture

It's great to know I'm not alone in this!

For What It's Worth...

vfranklyn's picture

We're in development for our redesign. My initial theory was to use our menu structure for a taxonomy guide, which worked pretty well, but we added some additional vocabularies as well:

  1. About the Library - pretty much reflects that section of the website.
  2. Audiences - Age level. Purpose is for ordering Content Types by age (for teen/senior/kids area in future)
  3. Computers - pretty much reflects that section of the website.
  4. Find a Good Book - pretty much reflects that section of the website.
  5. Format - website, database, video, download etc. Mainly for potential use with Views.
  6. Library Branches
  7. Policies
  8. Programming - listing of programs, events, etc. Possible use with Views and search indexing.
  9. Research - pretty much reflects that section of the website.
  10. Subjects - Used for our subject guides, with Views/CCK.
  11. Tags - Free tagging vocabulary for our recommended websites. Mostly for search indexing and staff benefit.

I think in retrospect, the vocabularies that were reflective of sections are primarily used for search indexing and may not be that important. I just decided to err on the side of too much taxonomy, as opposed to too little.

The vocabularies that have proven the most useful so far have been the ones used with Views/CCK.

I hope this helps. We're new at this too, so I would take my information with a grain of salt.

Hoover library taxonomy

mikeybusiness's picture

Our taxonomy took several revisions. I didn't know what I was doing to begin with. Now I generally don't show the taxonomy. I use taxonomy mostly for displaying and filtering content with views.

Listing Type - Lists several book lists or movie lists such as our movies that are playing. Examples are: First Thursday Book Discussion Group, Monday at the Movies, Nonfiction Book Discussion Group.

http://www.hooverlibrary.org/first-thursday

Year - For content that is time related like our authors conference attendees or shows that get a year tag. Nice for sorting things by year.

http://www.hooverlibrary.org/sv/guests/2009

Age Group - Adult, Teen, Children - For when we add event content. I use the age group to put the event on the right events page.

http://www.hooverlibrary.org/kidzone
http://www.hooverlibrary.org/teens
http://www.hooverlibrary.org/adults

Theatre / Show /Season - Examples are 2008-2009, 2009-2010 - gets the Theater shows in order.

http://www.hooverlibrary.org/thelibrarytheatre/season/2009-2010

Topics - this is a free tag category for staff blogging - They can put whatever they want. Common choices are - reviews, news, promotions

http://www.hooverlibrary.org/category/topic/news

Venue - there are several events that also might need a venue tag - An event "age group" tagged as a Adult and then also "Venue tagged" as Plaza. Would show up on our plaza page as well as our adult event page.

http://www.hooverlibrary.org/plaza

Story - Stories are for reporting our events. So Story types such as "plaza", show up on the plaza recordings page.

http://www.hooverlibrary.org/plaza/recordings

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