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Collecting, gathering, organizing, and storing. It would not be too risky to affirm that since we have understood ourselves as humanity we organize the things that are dear to us. Record collections, book collections, music compilations. The human being is a being that stores and organizes.
And the Web was created and on the sixth day there was already a list of five most incredible pages to visit. But how does this selection and acquisition of collections work on the web? I am not speaking of the technical aspects, this text is not about that, but I will bring to you the vision of library science and how it can help us create good collections of online documents. I will not focus on the details of the practice, but use some ideas as a basis for analogies.
But first, the Connecting Project
This text is the second in a series of content that I named the Connecting Project.
This project was developed somewhat unintentionally, to be quite honest. A few years ago, when I discovered Library Science, I saw a very close relationship between the work of the Librarian and what I did in SEO.
When I entered university, I began to connect in my mind everything I was learning with what I worked on day to day. So I began to write some texts about this connection I saw with the objective of helping me consolidate what I was learning.
And the Connecting Project emerged, which will connect SEO to Library Science with articles, videos, and audio that discuss the foundation of library science and its intimate relationship with the work of content optimization for the internet.
Initially I will discuss the foundations of Library Science: indexing, categorization, classification, and much more, always seeking the relationship of these practices with what Google does to organize information on the web and we, SEO professionals, do to optimize.
A collection for Library Science is…
In library science, a collection is defined as the collection of documents organized and available for consultation, study, research, or leisure. The 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 foundation 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 collection can be summarized thus:
- 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 is one of the most important elements of a library, therefore we will invest time to understand what a collection is and, along the way, we will think about its relationship with SEO.
What is a collection?
The collection is an object of study for several areas of Information Sciences, particularly Archival Science, Museology, and Library Science, which study this topic with great depth, each in its specificity.
Our objective is to bring the vision of Library Science, therefore for our text a collection is the set of documents, organized for study, reading, and consultation, that constitute the patrimony of a library. Can we expand the scope of the concept “collection” and of Library and call the Web The library with the largest collection in the world? From my point of view, we can.
The documents, in this type of collection, can be of various types, such as books, magazines, newspapers, maps, scores, photographs, videos, and everything else that is invented to serve as support for content.
It was based on this idea that I began to call content everything that is published on the Web, making this relationship between a collection and its documents with the Web and its content.
Therefore, it is one of the main resources of a library, it is from it that we, the users, can have access to information.
Characteristics of the collection for Library Science
We can summarize in the main characteristics below what we call a collection:
- It is a collection of organized documents;
- It can be of various types;
- It constitutes the patrimony of a library;
- It is an important resource for users;
- It must be diversified and updated;
In order to serve well the needs and desires of those who search for information, a collection needs to have two fundamental characteristics: diversity and updating. This set of documents needs to represent all, or the greater part, of the views on a given subject and be updated with the newest that has been produced in the areas it covers.
Again we draw the parallel between collection and the web. The aspect of updating is a settled point, perhaps one of the few things that everyone agrees on when we speak of the most important points of a good content project, site, or platform.
But I cannot say the same about diversity. The Internet and the Web, especially after the “advent of social networks” began to explicitly represent the characteristics of the communities of our planet: separated, niched, and antagonistic.
But then comes a search engine, like Google, and asks us for content that has all the relevant information to present well the information we are conveying. How are we going to do this if we, creators, are increasingly immersed in small groups that are increasingly homogeneous?
Perhaps a librarian can help us understand how to select, acquire, catalog, classify, and preserve a collection and we can apply this way of thinking to our site and content projects.
Library science, as one of the Information sciences, is dedicated to this study. It concerns itself with organizing, preserving, and disseminating the documents present in its collections. Who is responsible for doing this in our projects?
How a collection is built
Well, if I consider a collection a good analogy for the construction of content on the web, taking into account that this content can build a site, an online tool, a platform, or even a large portal, can I be inspired by the way a librarian builds a collection?
Well, to try to understand this aspect let us see how a librarian does this work?
I found this video below where Elani Araújo from the Librarian’s Tip channel discusses the construction of collections for children and I think we can use it as a basis to make some analogies:
If you watched the video you know that she discusses some very interesting things, raising some questions that we should ask when assembling a collection. Some of them quite close to those we ask when we build a site, optimize content, or assemble an SEO strategy. Let us look at them.
Who is my reader?
The first thing raised by Elani is to understand who my reader is. She even cites the term persona, something we are accustomed to using. If we make an analogy between a book and a site (or portal), can we affirm 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 the same questions.
But in the end, we all want to understand who is the human being who needs or desires to read, inform themselves, visit, consume something we can offer them, whether it is a book, a documentary, a site, a tool, or an article.
Understanding the visitor as a reader, who has their desires and needs and who is in search of satisfying them is a new way of creating content collections for our projects.
What is the perfect format for my reader?
I want to introduce you to a person who is very important to Library Science, an Indian named Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan. He was a mathematician and librarian and created a series of five statements that became known as the 5 laws of Library Science. They are:
- Books are for use;
- Every reader their book;
- Every book its reader;
- Save the time of the reader;
- A library is a growing organism.
When I learned of these laws, I was again impressed with the close relationship with what I understood as best practices on the Web, with things I learned in Web Design, in UX, in content creation, and in SEO. And inspired by him I created the 5 laws of SEO, somewhat playfully, and defined them thus:
- Information is for use.
- Every visitor has their content.
- Every content for its visitor.
- Save the time of the visitor.
- A site is a growing organism.
And what does this have to do with the video I indicated to you?
Here the point I want to raise is the perfect format for each type of reader. I connect two laws, one from Library Science and the other I created for SEO: Every book its reader and Every content for its visitor.
We can discuss the importance of choosing the ideal format.
If a book for an adolescent needs to have a cover that catches their attention, a relaxed editorial format, or illustrations created by someone popular on social networks, the format we choose for each type of content also exerts the same influence and weighs heavily on the attention the visitor gives to it.
Let us look at an example? I recently in a project had the idea of creating special content to meet a very specific need. In a conversation we reached the conclusion to create a kind of hub, a grouper of concepts. These pages will discuss subjects that revolve around a more comprehensive concept.
At first we thought of creating a post and connecting other posts to them, but the idea grew and we decided to create special pages, with a very specific layout, because we understood that this format would facilitate the consumption of the information we will place on them.
It would be much easier to create the posts, but it would not be better. The format would not give the information the importance it has and would not help format the content in the way we understand the visitor needs.
Content has to be good.
And now we connect the third point: the quality of content, which is basically the intersection between the technical quality of the environment created to host this content, its visual and experience design, the support for careful information organization.
In the formation of a collection, one of the fundamental points 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 place there is what will make the difference.
When we speak of quality in Web content I directly recall EEAT. And you?
Good and varied content is even better.
Diversifying the collection, offering what the reader wants to read. And going beyond, showing what they may want, but do not yet know is another of its characteristics. Is it possible to do the same on our sites?
Generally we use something like Read More, See Also at the end of content. Sometimes it is a suggestion based on categories, on the newest articles, or we can use AI or Semantics to select content related by context.
But there are more sophisticated forms, generally used on e-commerce sites, which increasingly use advanced techniques to predict what the consumer wants, and perhaps they have not even realized it yet.
The future promises us that we will be able to use these strategies in any and every type of content. In projects where I use WordLift as a tool for creating knowledge graphs, I can already use Machine Learning to make suggestions of other content in a more semantic way.
Knowing the reader. Knowing the visitor.
The fifth and final point I want to bring from the video is listening. Hearing 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.
Conducting research, understanding the desires and needs of these people, conversing and listening. Those who work with user experience have known this script for a long time. In SEO it is not so common, but it is a best practice that many take seriously.
Here we have again a point of connection.
Studying information users is an established practice in Library Science and in some areas of Web development. Can we draw from the source of Information Sciences to better understand our users?
I am certain that we can. Once they asked me what would be the ideal SEO team and I did not need much time to respond: UX + SEO + Branding. The part that interests us in this text is the connection between UX and SEO. The union of understanding user experience with the search to know their desires and needs creates a strong foundation upon which we can build exceptional projects.
But how is a collection built? Are there some rules?
The formation of a collection can, and should, follow a process to be developed by the responsible professionals. Generally its formation is planned and organized in a document called an acquisition policy, which according to the available money, guides the purchase of various types of materials, whether they are books, documents, or other types of works.
The selection of this collection, the choice of these materials, of the content and the chosen support (whether physical or digital), that will be the whole of this collection is made by the librarian, with support from other professionals of the organization where they work, who takes into consideration the selected sources and qualitative and quantitative selection criteria.
I ask you another question: can the SEO professional do the same on the Web? Is there the possibility of professional evolution of a person who optimizes content to be a kind of librarian on the Web?
If the Web is a large collection of digital documents (or content), can we manage all this information, not only thinking about search (information retrieval) but also thinking about the complete process: acquire, organize, make available, and retrieve? Tell me what you think.
