How the Library is organised

The inspiration for the structure of the ScotEID Library came from the British Library on Euston Road in London.

The British Library's St Pancras building was officially opened by Her Majesty the Queen on 25 June 1998.

Designed by architect Sir Colin St John Wilson, the Library was the largest UK public building to be built in the 20th century, and achieved Grade I listing status from Historic England in 2015.

Today the British Library’s iconic London site is used by over 1.75 million people each year and is much-loved as a space for research, inspiration and enjoyment. It is an amazing building and well worth a visit.

The Library has evolved to meet the changing needs of a multifaceted user base that, over the last two decades, has seen enormous changes in how we access, use and publish information, both in print and in digital formats.

Creating, organising, accessing and managing information is challenging, due to the many ways available to us now to access information and the vast amounts available can make it a daunting task.

In the structure of the ScotEID Library I have used layouts already familiar to us.

The first layer of the structure is that of a traditional building, with the most widely accessed categories being on the lower floors and the less used as we move up the structure.

The Ground Floor is divided into areas which represent the user options on the left hand menu of ScotEID.com. In these categories, are our user help and instructions, by creating step by step how to's, capturing images and videos; replacing our current lengthy user guides.

On the Mezzanine Floor which includes the cafe (albeit bring your own) , you can access information on using the library, how to get started, News articles, Published papers - ScotEID and Industry.

The First Floor holds the categories for the administration of ScotEID by the Help Team. Divided as the Ground Floor into areas representing the left hand menu of ScotEID.com for admin with additional categories for Account and Passport Management.

The Second Floor is the 'Tech' Floor, reserved for all technical items that may be require to be accessed from ScotEID.com or kept in the library for ease of access and version control. It may include SLA's, Data Agreements, Recovery Plans, etc.

Subsequent floors are earmarked for Project documentation storage after implementation allowing for searchable content.

To conclude, whilst the structure of our Library is based on that of a physical building, there are no restrictions as to what we can change. Floors, Categories, Guides can all be moved, relocated to anywhere else in the structure and hierarchy, and archived to a 'basement', with one quick edit.

Thank you for reading.

If you have any questions please contact me at Debbie.Dow@saos.coop.