Blog by LLM
The Art of Repository Design

An essay on KM best practices

Any housing for information – physical or virtual (a database, a digital repository, a file cabinet, a brick and mortar library) – should be designed so that content that is closely related, or needs to be frequently cross-referenced, is housed reasonably close together.  

Obviously with digital content, linking can provide a sense of proximity that cannot be achieved as easily in a physical space.  But even so, a digital repository design that depends on excessive linking outside itself can present its own challenges. 

It’s something of an art form (or a science) to figure out the best design for your repository.  It is an exercise similar to normalizing a database, to determine the most efficient organization and structure.

The goal for digital repositories which utilize the architecture of siloed “spaces” or “sites” is to achieve the best balance between proximity of content and depth of content.  Too much depth (too many nested hierarchies) in a single repository space may dictate the need for parsing that content into two or more smaller spaces.  Too little depth in a repository space, resulting in excessive linking to other repositories, may indicate a need to consolidate some content into a single space. 

Every collection of content for a team, group, or department needs to undergo a detailed analysis, and be considered in context with related teams, so that the best possible decisions can be made for repository design.

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