Collecting, gathering, organizing, and storing. It wouldn't be too risky to say that ever since we've understood ourselves as human beings, we've organized the things we hold dear. Record collections, book archives, music compilations. Human beings are beings who keep and organize.

And the Web was created, and by the sixth day it already had a list of the five most incredible pages to visit. But how does this selection and acquisition of collections work on the web? I'm not talking about the technical aspects; this text isn't about that, but I will bring you the perspective of library science and how it can help us create good online . I won't focus on the practical details, but use some ideas as a basis for analogies.

But first, the Connecting Project 

This text is the second in a series of articles that I've named Project Connecting. 

To be honest, this project was developed somewhat unintentionally. A few years ago, when I discovered Library Science, I saw a very close relationship between the work of a Librarian and what I was doing in SEO .

When I started college, I began connecting everything I was learning with my daily work. So I started writing some texts about this connection I saw, with the goal of helping me solidify what I was learning. 

And so the Connecting Project emerged, which will connect SEO to Library Science with articles, videos, and audios that discuss the foundations of library science and its close relationship with the work of optimizing content the internet.

Initially, I'll talk about the basics of Library Science: indexing, categorization , classification, and much more, always seeking to relate these practices to what Google does to organize information on the web and what we, SEOs, do to optimize it.

A collection for Library Science is…

In library science, a collection is defined as a set of organized documents available for consultation, study, research, or leisure. Documents can be of different types, such as books, magazines, newspapers, maps, atlases, reference works, audiovisual documents, etc.

The collection is one of the most important elements of a library , as it is the basis for its operation and for serving its users, and the librarian is the professional responsible for the selection, organization, and preservation of all this material.

The definition that library science gives for a collection can be summarized as follows:

• It is a collection of organized documents;
• It is available for consultation, study, research or leisure;
• It can be of different types, such as books, magazines, newspapers, maps, atlases, reference works, audiovisual documents, etc.;

It's one of the most important elements of a library, so we're going to invest some time in understanding what a collection is and, along the way, we'll consider its relationship with SEO.

What is an archive?

The collection is the subject of study for several areas of Information Science , particularly Archival Science, Museology, and Library Science, which study this topic in great depth, each in its own specific field.

Our goal is to bring the perspective of Library Science; therefore, for our purposes, a collection is the set of documents, organized for study, reading, and consultation, that constitute the assets of a library. Can we broaden the scope of the concept of "collection" and "library" and call the Web " The library with the largest collection in the world "? From my point of view, yes, we can.

The documents in this type of collection can be of various types, such as books, magazines, newspapers, maps, musical scores, photographs, videos, and anything else that can be invented to support a content.

It was based on this idea that I began to call everything published on the Web "content," making this connection between a collection and its documents with the Web and its contents.

Therefore, it is one of the main resources of a library; it is through it that we, the users, can access information.

Characteristics of the collection for Library Science

We can summarize what we call a collection in the main characteristics below:

• It is a collection of organized documents;
• It can be of various types;
• It constitutes the assets of a library;
• It's an important feature for users;
• It should be diverse and up-to-date;

In order to adequately meet the needs and desires of those seeking information, a collection must have two fundamental characteristics: diversity and up-to-dateness. This set of documents must represent all, or most, of the perspectives on a given subject and be updated with the latest developments in the areas it covers.

Again, we draw a parallel between archives and the web. The aspect of updating is a point of agreement, perhaps one of the few things everyone agrees on when discussing the most important aspects of a good content project, website , or platform.

But I can't say the same about diversity. The Internet and the Web, especially after the "advent of social networks," began to explicitly represent the characteristics of communities on our planet: separate, niche, and antagonistic.

But then a search engine like Google comes along and asks us for content that has all the relevant information to present the information we're conveying effectively. How are we going to do that if we, the creators, are increasingly immersed in small, increasingly homogeneous groups?

Perhaps a librarian can help us understand how to select, acquire, catalog, classify, and preserve a collection, and we can apply that way of thinking to our website and content projects.

Library science, as one of the information sciences, is dedicated to this study. It is concerned with organizing, preserving, and disseminating the documents present in its collections. Who is responsible for doing this in our projects?

How to build a collection

Well, if I consider a collection a good analogy for building web content, taking into account that this content can build a website, an online tool, a platform, or even a large portal, could I draw inspiration from the way a librarian builds a collection?

Okay, to try and understand this aspect, let's see how a librarian does this work.

I found this video below where Elani Araújo from the channel Dica de Bibliotecária talks about building collections for children, and I think we can use it as a basis for making some analogies:

If you watched the video, you know she talks about some very interesting things, raising some questions we should ask ourselves when putting together an archive. Some of them are very similar to the questions we ask ourselves when building a website, optimizing content, or developing an SEO strategy. Let's look at them.

Who is my reader?

The first thing Elani raises is understanding who my reader is. She even mentions the term persona, something we're used to using. If we draw an analogy between a book and a website (or portal), can we say that our visitors can be seen as readers?

UX professionals ask themselves the same question:

Who are the people who visit us? Who are our users?

Those who create content ask themselves the same questions.

But ultimately, we all want to understand who the human being is who needs or wants to read, to be informed, to visit, to consume something that we can offer them, be it a book, a documentary, a website, a tool, or an article.

Understanding the visitor as a reader, who has their own desires and needs and is seeking to satisfy them, is a new way to create content repertoires for our projects.

What's the perfect format for my reader?

I want to introduce you to someone who is very important to Library Science, an Indian man named Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan. He was a mathematician and librarian who created a series of five statements that became known as the 5 laws of Library Science. They are:

1. Books are meant to be used;
2. Every reader has their own book;
3. Every book has its reader;
4. Save the reader's time;
5. A library is a growing organism.

When I learned about these laws, I was once again impressed by their close relationship to what I understood as best practices on the web, to things I learned in web design, UX, content creation, and SEO. And inspired by them, I jokingly 5 laws of SEO

1. Information is meant to be used.
2. Each visitor has their own content.
3. Each piece of content is tailored to your visitor.

• Save the visitor's time.
• A website is a growing organism.

And what does that have to do with the video I recommended?

The point I want to make here is about the perfect format for each type of reader. I'm connecting two laws, one from Library Science and the other that I created for SEO: Every book has its reader , and every piece of content has its visitor .

We can talk about the importance of choosing the ideal format.

If a book for a teenager needs to have an eye-catching cover, a relaxed editorial format, or illustrations created by someone popular on social media, the format we choose for each type of content also exerts the same influence and weighs heavily on the attention the visitor gives it.

Let's look at an example? I recently had the idea, while working on a project, to create special content to meet a very specific need. In a conversation, we came to the conclusion of creating a kind of hub, a grouping of concepts. These pages will discuss topics that revolve around a broader concept.

Initially, we thought about creating one post and linking other posts to it, but the idea grew, and we decided to create special pages with a very specific layout because we understood that this format would make it easier to consume the information we would put on them.

It would be much easier to create the posts, but it wouldn't be better. The format wouldn't give the information the importance it deserves and wouldn't help format the content in the way we understand the visitor needs.

The content has to be good.

And now we connect the third point: the quality of the content, which is basically the intersection between the technical quality of the environment created to host that content, its visual and user experience , and the support for careful organization of information.

In building a collection, one of the fundamental aspects is the quality of its documents. Whether your collection is a series of shelves full of books or a portal with thousands of products, the quality of the information you put there will make all the difference.

When we talk about quality in web content, I immediately think of EEAT. What about you?

Good and varied content is even better.

Diversifying the collection, offering what the reader wants to read. And going further, showing what they might want but don't yet know about, is another of its characteristics. Is it possible to do the same on our websites?

We generally use something like "Read More" or "See Also" at the end of a piece of content. Sometimes it's a suggestion based on categories, the newest articles, or we might use AI or semantics to select related content based on context.

But there are more sophisticated methods, generally used on e-commerce websites, that increasingly employ advanced techniques to predict what the consumer wants, and perhaps the consumer hasn't even realized it yet .

The future promises that we will be able to use these strategies in any and all types of content. In projects where I use WordLift as a tool for creating knowledge graphs , I can already use Machine Learning to suggest other content in a more semantic way.

Get to know the reader. Get to know the visitor.

The fifth and final point I want to bring up from the video is listening. Listening to the people who will consult the collection you are creating is the most fundamental part, after all, it is for them that you are making this enormous effort, investing many resources (of time and money) and creating an entire structure to store all these documents.

Doing research, understanding people's desires and needs, talking and listening. Anyone who works with user experience has known this script for a long time. In SEO it's not so common, but it's a good practice that many take seriously.

Here we have another point of connection.

Studying information users is an established practice in Library Science and some areas of Web development. Can we draw from the field of Information Science to better understand our users?

I'm sure of it. I was once asked what the ideal SEO team would be, and I didn't need much time to answer: UX + SEO + Branding. The part that interests us in this text is the connection between UX and SEO. The union of understanding the user experience with the pursuit of knowing their desires and needs creates a strong foundation upon which we can build exceptional projects.

But how does one build a collection? Are there any rules?

Building a collection can, and should, follow a process developed by the professionals responsible. Generally, its formation is planned and organized in a document called an acquisition policy, which, according to the available funds, guides the purchase of various types of materials, whether books, documents, or other types of works.

The selection of this collection, the choice of these materials, the content, and the chosen format (whether physical or digital), which will form the whole of this collection, is made by the librarian, with the support of other professionals from the organization where they work, taking into account the selected sources and qualitative and quantitative selection criteria.

Let me ask you another question: can an SEO professional do the same on the web? Is there a possibility for someone who optimizes content to evolve professionally into a kind of librarian on the web?

If the Web is a vast repository of digital documents (or content), can we manage all this information, not only in terms of searching (information retrieval) but also considering the entire process: acquiring, organizing, making available, and retrieving? Tell me what you think.