Thinking outside of the office

Archival issues abound in our office. Once a story moves off of our main news well, it's time to type your keyword in the searchbox and hope your result turns up somewhere in the top 50.

I told my colleague that I could never find the results I needed using our search. I was looking for an education story and typed in "education" or some generic-type word like that and got results that were far too broad. But what was I expecting? My colleagues enjoyed a good laugh at my expense. "Why didn't you just type in the person's name in the story?" At the time, I agreed I needed an IQ test and the meeting moved on.

This morning, however, it occurred to me that if we thought like our Web page visitors who have no knowledge of our institution, we might find that the search I requested wasn't far off the mark. The scenario: Visitor from outside our University comes to our Web site on the day we run a story about our teacher education program. Reads the story and moves on. Two weeks later, the visitor remembers reading something on our web site and wants to find the story again. The visitor cannot remember anything about the details of the story except that it was about education or teacher education. What are going to be the search results for this visitor?

Archiving our past stories in a place where we can set our search to search only our main news well archive and not all over the entire institutional web site is critical. Maybe not for us but definitely for people who don't work in our office. If the person we wrote the story about couldn't find the story when she did a search, there's no way the audience we want to reach outside the university will have any luck!