Myself and a colleague  have been having some discussions recently about the re-purposing of a site’s resources section. When I think of the term ‘resource’ I think of a downloadable document you can use in whatever area you’re based, at your own leisure. These resources are all HTML documents. I don’t think this the best way to represent the information.

Sitting down we thought about what relationships existed between these files; could it be date, format, discipline, subject area, etc.

The only link we found was the type of resource. The documents we have fit into these categories:

• teacher resource notes
• research reports
• research guides
• case studies
• conference papers
• event reports
• bi-annual publication and e-news
• guidance notes
• subjects surveys
• teaching and learning manuals

The biggest problem with this: these categories don’t fit the site's users will browse. When they come, they come looking for something specific. They don’t think ‘I really need some guidance notes’. They are more likely to think ‘I really need some guidance notes on clinical education’.

A selection of our site search terms:

• case solving skills
• teaching packages
• asian culture
• legal research skills
• professional responsibility

These are all quite specific terms and the above categories don’t help the user. People arrive and use the search, this means they’re not seeing everything and missing things that might further assist their teaching.

The resources cannot be split into specific areas like this.

So, without re-purposing we have to stick to the original arrangement. What if the above document was 60% Assessment and 40% e-learning? You're looking for e learning but you'll miss the above document because of it’s Assessment weighting.

To avoid this we decided to implement keyword based navigation. Now, I wouldn’t normally recommend a tag cloud as a method of navigation; it’s messy, especially when you have a large number of words. However, in this case it really works.

It’s dynamic and driven by the database so whenever a new resource is submitted the keywords are automatically added. I would stress that there needs to be a controlled vocabulary otherwise it’s going to start getting difficult to manage.

It removes the problem of a resource falling into more than one subject area. It also satisfies the navigation nature of our users. A teacher arrives looking for distance learning resources, when they click that word the system highlights all the resources under distance learning. There’s also no duplication of documents and it opens up all the resources on the site.