IBM: Tagging to open up archives

Tagging and RSS provide a neat solution to navigating a deep and ever-expanding archive.

The Site

IBM, the US-based technology giant, offers an extended archive of press releases stretching back to 1998 in the Press room section of the corporate side of its website. A tab at the head of the Press releases page gives the option of a Press release finder. This allows users to ‘drill’ down into the archive in stages, starting with a choice of either year (any from 1998 onwards) followed by topic (12, from Business partners and Corporate to Software and Storage, plus All topics) or vice versa. When year is chosen, this introduces a further choice of month from a list that excludes months for which there are no matches. The active filter terms are listed at the top of the results with an option to remove one or all to broaden out the search.

Individual press releases pick up the categorisation, with links for ‘Related XML feeds’ given at the foot of each page providing the chance to subscribe to RSS feeds of news on the recommended topics.

The Takeaway

Away from all the debate about what ‘Web 2.0’ means for corporates, IBM has quietly applied two of the tools most frequently associated with the concept – tagging and RSS – to provide a neat and unusual solution to the problem of navigating a deep and ever-expanding archive (more than 100 releases have already been added in 2007).

By tagging the releases with keywords according to date and topic, IBM enables users to access the archive through multiple paths according their interests, rather than corralling them into information silos. Tailored RSS feeds and contextual prompts carry through this clever thinking and reflect the growing trend to ‘push’, rather than ‘pull’, information channels.

First published on 06 March, 2007