NYPL Labs

We have been trying to nail down the broad categories that will comprise the top-navigation labels in the Digital Gallery’s latest redesign. Our goal has been to make these as user-centered and jargon-free as possible. It’s becoming clear, however, that we are running into a semantic conundrum – which others have noted – that Libraries, Collections, Divisions, Departments, Programmes, etc. pose when we try to map their administrative meanings to their possible meanings in the real world, the library world and the NYPL-world.

The Digital Gallery currently offers 3 broad top-navigation categories: Explore (Collection Guides); Browse (Names A-Z, Subjects, Libraries); My Digital (Search History, Selections). The “My” items will be moving to a top-level “accounts” area to include preferences, cart, etc., and in one scenario the remaining topnav categories have been suggested as: Collection Guides, Names, Subjects, Years, Divisions.

You say tomato, I say tomahto

Why “divisions” and not the current term “libraries?” First, some cons from my perspective:

1. “Division” seems to have little native meaning outside of NYPL – it maps to our NYPL jargon, but it has as good a chance to sound like a reference to MLB than anything else to anyone who isn’t currently NYPL staff.

2. It is largely specific to one NYPL Research Center’s (Humanities & Social Sciences Library) organization of its departments/collections at NYPL. The Science, Industry & Business Library is not really comprised of Divisions, and the Mid-Manhattan Library is described as one of units of the Central Libraries of the circulating libraries.

3. One finds little use of the term “Divisions” as an organizing principle on NYPL’s site, which may only further confuse users. If divisions were used consistently by the larger NYPL site, we’d then have a convention to rely on. NYPL’s main topnav says “Libraries & Hours.”

My not so strong case for “Divisions,” but I’m very interested in hearing others:

1. Divisions are historically the way that the curatorial units of the Research Libraries have been described administratively. We often use the term “divisions” within the Digital Experience Group and when engaging in NYPL projects, so it has meaning to us.

2. The large majority of items in Digital Gallery right now come from the Research Center whose holding libraries are administratively described as “divisions,” so for much of our digital material, this designation would be accurate and not risk vagueness.

3. “Division” is in the name of many, well, divisions. The General Research Division, Asian and Middle Eastern Division, Map Division, Dorot Jewish Division, and others are all well known by these names.

Is there a 3rd way?

Things change, and all of these designations administratively, of course, are subject to change. Although the NYPL site uses as a top-level organizing category the term “Libraries,” within the four Research Centers it lists the curatorial units (aka Collections or Divisions) under each center as “Collections.” We’ve actually been down this road before: “Collections” was one of the many terms suggested to describe the holding libraries during the original IA design process for the Digital Gallery in 2004.

But at NYPL a Collection/Division can have many Collections, resulting in a taxonomical game of “whose on first?” The A.G. Spalding Baseball Collection resides in the Photography Collection of the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The Wallach Print Collection includes the I.N. Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints, The Eno collection of New York City views, and the C. W. McAlpin Collection among many others. So we eventually settled on a term that, although far from a perfect solution, did at least allow us to differentiate between the Rooms (Libraries) that hold the things and the Things (Collections) themselves. It also gave us more flexibility in identifying “collections” in Digital Gallery as something described by the Collection Guides.

Simplicity versus simplistic

I’d be very interested in hearing others’ experiences in ascribing meaningful terms to potentially arcane administrative units. It’s often proposed that a site should not map to the structure of an institution, but this not always so easy to accomplish, especially in larger institutions. And among cultural organizations there are even larger and more unwieldy organizations than NYPL.

Compare this topnav:

Peace & Security | Economic & Social Development │ Human Rights │ Humanitarian Affairs │ International Law

to this (partial) one:

Departments | Regions | Funds and Programmes | Agencies | Institutes

These topnavs both appear on the United Nations’ website, an organization arguably more unwieldy than our own. The first appears on the main splash page, while the second appears on “Economic & Social Development” page. While it might be important for folks to get to these departments on the ESD pages, the jargon-rich designations here make it difficult to do more than mouse-over and take a guess at where you might be headed if you didn’t all ready know where you are going. This is most definitely not to pick on the U.N. (I chose them to illustrate because they are large and I knew they had “Programmes.”) The U.N. often does an amazing job at surfacing on their many sites, mostly in a user-centered way, the paths one may want to take.

The ESD might even be a particular case where they’ve determined the need to get users to the program units as quickly as possible, and this may turn out to be informed by user testing. Still, it does produce a certain amount of cognitive dissonance – at least for this user – when one leaves the jargon-free safety of Peace, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Affairs only to be confronted with the cold reality of Departments, Programmes, and Institutes.