Everything is a service: Information architecture on academic library websites

Library websites are famously complex, but how much does that complexity vary across institutions? This paper presents a comprehensive review of information architecture across the library websites of Canadian doctorate-granting institutions. The categories, page-level items, homepage blocks, and quick links found on 37 institutional websites are exhaustively coded and analyzed. Seven high-frequency navigation categories and 30 high-frequency page-level items are identified and their relationships examined. The navigational category ABOUT is found to be the most common and internally consistent category across institutions, while SERVICES and RESEARCH categories are popular but highly diffuse and unpredictable. SERVICES, in particular, is shown to be essentially meaningless as a category, since it encompasses most library topics and renders other categories less predictable by association. Across all institutions, only the search widget and borrowing information are universally present. Implications of these findings for academic library information design are discussed.