The Library of Alexandria: Information Architecture History
Information architecture is the science of organizing information. Designers know that it is the foundation to any good digital product. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or innovative the product is, without appropriate IA laying down the blueprint for organization, the product would be unusable. Effective IA depends on: ontology, taxonomy, and choreography.
Information organization is not a recent phenomenon that emerged with the rise of digital products, people have long been organizing information in libraries. Perhaps the most famous library in history is The Great Library of Alexandria, which not only took on a legendary status following its destruction, but also pioneered many organizational methods that are used in all libraries and IA design principles today.
The Library of Alexandria was first conceived as a dream by Alexander the Great, where he envisioned a universal library that contained works from all over the world unified under one roof. While Alexander was not able to see this dream fulfilled, his friend and successor Ptolemy realized his dream and built the great library around 295 BC. At its peak, it had as many as 700,000 scrolls in its collection. Needless to say, effective organization was essential for the library to be used at all. All three elements that effective Information Architecture relies on were originated here to organize the largest collection of information in the ancient world.
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the method of organization. Classification sorts elements into similar categories. Hierarchy ranks information in different ways, such as frequency of use, recency, alphabetically, and so on.
The Library of Alexandria’s first librarian, Zenodotus, first tackled the collection by sorting works into 3 main categories, each assigned to a different room. Within each category, Zenodotus innovatively organized the texts alphabetically by the first letter of the author’s name. That’s right, alphabetical ranking, something that seems so commonplace these days, was invented by Zenodotus for the Library of Alexandria. Later on, Zenodotus employed Greek scholar Callimachus to make the library organization even more efficient as the size grew. Callimachus made his mark by creating further categorical divisions in the form of genres.
Ontology
Ontology is the meaning of a product’s elements. It gives labels to categories and tags to organize content.
To further organize texts and make it easier for users to browse through works, Zenodotus had small tags attached to each scroll that contained information such as the title, subject, and author. This was the first recorded use of tagging and metadata (data that provides information about other data).
Choreography
Choreography is concerned with the user flow, or the path through a product that a user can take to accomplish a task.
To help library users navigate more easily, Callimachus also created pinakes, or a library catalogue as we know them today. The pinakes listed and categorized works within the library, organized by author and genre. This allowed scholars to search the library system much more efficiently, rather than having to wander around aimlessly.
It’s fascinating to see that so many impactful techniques today are deeply rooted in history. Despite all the time that has passed, information organization has not really changed. As designers, we should always keep these lessons in mind and organize information according to the principles tried and tested thousands of years ago.
References:
Philips, H. (2010). The Great Library of Alexandria? Library Philosophy and Practice.
Learn UX Design and UI Design Online: UX Bootcamp. (n.d.). Retrieved December 31, 2020, from https://trydesignlab.com/academy/information-architecture/1/lessons/intro-to-information-architecture/
