Classifying Designing Web Navigation

Looks like libraries are putting Designing Web Navigation under the LC Classification of TK5105.888. This is roughly:

  • Technology
    • Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
      • Telecommunication, including telegraphy, telephone, radio, radar, television.

The full call number in a given library might be something like TK5105.888 .K35 2007.

LC Subject Headings from several libraries include:

  • Electronic texts
  • Web site development
  • Web sites–Design.
  • World Wide Web
  • User interfaces (Computer systems)
  • Internet searching

Amazon has these subjects:

  • Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Web Browsers
  • Books > Computers & Internet > Home Computing > Internet > Web Browsers
  • Books > Computers & Internet > Graphic Design > Website Architecture & Usability

O’Reilly has it under on their site

  • Web > Web Design

Libri.de has the subjects:

  • User Interfaces
  • Internet – Browsers
  • Internet / Programmierung
  • Internet – Web Site Design

Compare these to the tags on LibraryThing:

  • $ Köp (1)
  • Collib (1)
  • computers (1)
  • currently reading (1)
  • design (1)
  • faceted browse (1)
  • information (1)
  • iacanberra (1)
  • information (1)
  • information architecture (3)
  • information seeking (1)
  • labels (1)
  • layout (1)
  • library2 (1)
  • navigation (3)
  • non-fiction (2)
  • organization (1)
  • rias (1)
  • rich web applications (1)
  • search (1)
  • tagging (1)
  • to catalogue (1)
  • to read (1)
  • usability (2)
  • user research (1)
  • ux (2)
  • visual design (1)
  • web (2)
  • web design

What does this tell us? Not 100% sure. Some of the controlled subject headings are off, like “Electronic texts” from LCSH and “Web browsers” from Amazon. So it’s hard to make a case that those are better access points.

The tags seem better to me, but perhaps too numerous. (Of course, I tagged the heck out of Designing Web Navigation on LibraryThing, so I’m contradicting myself). And except for a few personal tags, I actually find they are more descriptive of the book. There is information on tagging and facetted browse interfaces in the book, and that’s hard to show in most library subject headings.

So from this sample, the tags win out in for me.

About Jim Kalbach

Head of Customer Experience at MURAL

2 comments

  1. Tim

    Hey. This is very interesting stuff. I hope you won’t mind a comment from me. (This is the founder of LibraryThing.)

    Here’s the complete tag list, sorted by frequency (I think you missed some). I think it shows that, while a single tag means nothing, stuff that get repeated acquires some significance. In this case, I think 3 and up are clearly good. Ideally I like to use only 10 and up, but the principle is clear.

    web (12)
    web design (10)
    design (5)
    information architecture (5)
    computers (4)
    interface design (3)
    internet (3)
    oreilly (3)
    usability (3)
    development (2)
    non-fiction (2)
    programming (2)
    reference (2)
    user interface (2)
    @box c1 (1)
    615-01 (1)
    basement (1)
    bedroom large bookcase (1)
    box 17 (1)
    business (1)
    cases (1)
    cd-rom (1)
    cheryl (1)
    computing (1)
    cover (1)
    db0107 (1)
    design usability web context (1)
    designingwebnavigation (1)
    doublebanked (1)
    html (1)
    human factors (1)
    human-computer interaction (1)
    iacanberra (1)
    Information Design (1)
    interaction design (1)
    Internet searching (1)
    IST Recommended (1)
    it (1)
    Knowledge Navigation Center (1)
    location-office (1)
    mass.gov (1)
    methods (1)
    navigation (1)
    no tags (1)
    office (1)
    r541 (1)
    read (1)
    ruby.mn (1)
    study (1)
    technical (1)
    technology (1)
    ui (1)
    user experience (1)
    user-centered design (1)
    ux (1)
    web development (1)
    web navigation (1)
    web publishing (1)
    web site design (1)
    Web sites–Design (1)
    web work (1)
    web/design/computer (1)
    webmass (1)
    webnavigation (1)
    website (1)
    work (1)

  2. James Kalbach

    Hey Tim,

    Thanks for the input. Yeah, looks like I missed a bunch of tags for DWN.

    I’m not sure about the 3+ use tags. They start getting generic like the LCSH. And some of the single use tags are really good, like “web navigation”. So does the 10+ principle help or hurt things?

    Cheers,
    Jim

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://experiencinginformation.com/2007/12/18/78/
experiencinginformation.com
CC-MAIN-2023-23
77247
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BB5XGAEECZVRNTLCHHCTNHKG6A2SLTWH
<urn:uuid:20a12c5a-cd01-43cc-91b3-0c9a0cab8b53>
2023-05-31T23:29:47Z
192.0.78.25
text/html
sha1:O4EIZAQ7OE3MCRPZJIMCXGABFI5R7MJ4
<urn:uuid:3ef4d427-6e24-40c6-930f-3184f7bdb698>
https://experiencinginformation.com/2007/12/18/78/
response
<urn:uuid:5dacaa54-91ce-4078-8966-ef44e8875dc8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-23
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-37
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/