Towards an information architecture for flexible reuse of digital media

Our research is concerned with designing support for ubiquitous access, organization, and interpretation of digital assets that users produce and store across multiple devices and computing platforms. Through a co-design study with scientists we identified specific aspects of conceptual maps they wish to create for their projects in order to make sense of diverse collections of digital media related to their individual and collective work. By the use of a technology probe called DeskPiles we observed the mechanisms involved in such a process. We identified the practice of using sub-document elements to compose the views of digital collections and diverse linking strategies to express semantic relations among concepts and ideas and to enable access to supporting digital assets. Our findings reveal the need to expand traditional information architectures and include (1) an extended range of content reference options and (2) transformation services to enable extraction, conversion, and linking of digital content. We advocate a granular and multi-format representation of content as the basis for reuse and ubiquitous access of digital media in diverse multi-device environments.