Information Studies Taxonomy: a faceted organizational taxonomy for a digital repository¶

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Description¶

The Information Studies Taxonomy was developed to organize resources in a digital repository at the Division of Information Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, supporting students and faculty in locating resources for teaching, learning and research tasks. It used "a faceted organization scheme" with five major facets identified from analysis of existing resources, stakeholder interviews and task analysis: Courses, Research groups, Resource types, Information types and Topics. "The first version of the Information studies taxonomy, used in this study, comprised seven facets and about 540 categories." The subject facet (Topics) was the largest with twelve main categories and more than 440 categories, and the taxonomy was implemented in the University e-learning platform using the TLE-Equella software.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Constructed from sources including course syllabi, research proposals, theses, publications, the school website, professional guidelines, domain taxonomies, the Dewey Decimal Classification and three domain thesauri

Constraints¶

• The interface did not allow participants to visualize the whole tree structure; it allowed only top-down navigation displaying one level at a time, due to system limitation

Target Learners¶

• Master's and PhD students and faculty in information studies, information systems and knowledge management

Target Learning Goals¶

• locating information resources to accomplish tasks related to teaching, learning and research

Claims¶

Related Elements¶

• Curated list of data repositories for classroom data collection

Examples¶

• Use resource types as subdivisions of their associated contexts rather than as separate facets

Key Sources¶

• Khoo, C.S.G., Wang, Z., & Chaudhry, A.S. (2013). Task-based navigation of a taxonomy interface to a digital repository. Information Research, 17(4) paper 547. http://InformationR.net/ir/17-4/paper547.html