Information Organisation - Item 2

1. Describe what role an Information Architect plays in the development of a web site. An Information Architect plays an enormous role in the development of a website. They are the key to presenting information clearly to the user, depending on the what information they trying to find. In other words, an Information Architect are the arrows in a large labyrinth to help get to the middle faster, without getting lost.
2. Arrange the following list in alphabetical order, then answer the questions below: (completed)

• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• 1-2-3 of Magic, The
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• Albany, New York
• El Paso, Texas
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• Hague, Netherlands, The
• Lord of the Rings, The
• St. Louis, Missouri
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• New York, New York
• Newark, New York
• Plzen, Czech
• XVIIme siécle
• .38 Special

a) Did you put The Hague under T or H? Under H, "The" is emphasizing a topic.

b) Did you put El Paso under E or P? Under E because it is a name of a landmark.

c) Which came first in your list, Newark or New York? New York comes first, because spaces are sorted first before anything else.

d) Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas? St. Louis. Abbreviations are treated as fully spelt.

e) How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters? As stated by the document "Guidelines for Alphabetical Arrangement of Letters and Sorting of Numerals and Other Symbols" (found here: http://www.niso.org/publications/tr/tr03.pdf), Spaces are highest priority, symbols other than numerals, letters, and punctuation marks come second, numbers third (0-9), letters fourth (A-Z), punctuation marks comes last.

f) Assuming the italicised terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organise the list? Organise the list into two different lists, with one of them with the heading "Book Titles" and the other list heading "Other".

g) If the cities represent you've visited and the book titles are ones you've read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way? By sorting the information from titles read and cities been visited, being highlighted and sent to the bottom with oldest viewed item being the last.

h) Look at how some of the other students have organised this information and comment on their blogs.