I disagree in the claim that the work on content inventories should stand in the way of creativity and fresh approach. In my world the inventory will result in a bunch of LEGOs with which you can be creative afterwards. Of course restricted by the business needs and clients demands.

Currently I’m working on a large intranet project. From the outset the client has told us, that they have no resources to develop new or more content. Therefore I need to get a clear picture of what I have to work with. This leads me to – the content inventory.

So maybe what you call a survey, I call an inventory and we are in complete agreement

I think that Donna probably nails it when she says that we probably work on quite different kinds of sites. Perhaps for the type of sites she works on, her approach is necessary. For the kinds I work on, it’s not.

I also think there will also be a bit of confusion over how ‘thin’ a content survey is. When I’m doing a content survey, quite often I look at just about every piece of content (with varying degrees of detail), but I don’t document every piece of content to the degree of detail that I understand that Donna does.

In my experience, I don’t think that’s necessary – in the initial stages at least. Too often I’ve documented vast amounts of content only to put a red pen through whole swathes of it. Often times when you’re doing a content survey you’re 90% sure that this is rubbish content (or, what’s the proper term – ROT). No point giving yourself brain numbness and RSI documenting all of this (disclaimer: at least, not for the vast majority of work that I do).

So, I disagree with Donna when she says that the ‘content survey’ approach leads to top-down IA. It probably does if you don’t look at enough of the content in enough detail. I agree with Donna that a blended approach is better.

I still hold that getting too down and dirty with the detail of the content makes you focus more on ‘what is’ than ‘what could be’. I think that to argue that it’s a matter of your skill as an IA to divorce yourself from that existing structure is a bit too easy. I think that the problem is inherantly cognitive – it’s just the way our minds work.

I do admit though, that it’s probably not good form for an IA to own up to that weakness.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, it comes down to the kinds of work you’re doing and the kind of person that you are. Most of my clients don’t really care for the level of documentation that is the output of a full content inventory, nor do they have the time or the budget to allow it.

Diff’rent strokes…

(this almost looks like a blog-post sized comment, doesn’t it!)