Picture of Trinity College Library by Michaela Murphy on Unsplash.

For Well-Structured Content, Think Like a Librarian

I realize few people think about librarians, nevermind thinking like them, but their skill set is extremely relevant to website copywriting.* 

Consider a person entering a library. They are confronted with reams of information. Without some kind of organizing structure to refer to, they are flying blind and completely overwhelmed. 

Librarians provide the necessary structure by classifying the books and other resources on the library’s shelves.

It’s the same for web pages and blog posts, albeit on a smaller scale. 

If visitors to a website see one big block of text, it’s information overload. They can’t parse it or make sense of it without considerable effort so they might gloss over key details, failing to see value in what is written or, worse, leave a site altogether because they can’t be bothered wading through all that text to try to derive meaning.

Digital distractions and short attention spans mean you have to get meaning across fast, but how? 

Like a librarian, you can “classify” the information on your site–through the use of descriptive subheadings–to make it immediately clear what visitors will find and where. The more easily people get your point, the faster they will see value and the more likely they will be to keep reading. 

Plan Your Heading Structure

Classification is a very detailed set of rules for organizing library resources. Fortunately, you don’t need to know or follow these rules; you just need to keep the visual of a library in mind when writing. 

In a library, classification is like a roadmap that helps you get the lay of the land, then pinpoints exactly where you need to go so you don’t have to browse every shelf in the building. 

Consider the very detailed, hierarchical “map” for locating a vegan cookbook. (This map uses the Dewey Decimal system, which is one of the better known classification systems. The information for this graphic was sourced from LibraryThing.)

Inverted triangle showing the hierarchical Dewey Decimal Classification for a vegan cookbook, demonstrating how librarians structure content.

In a blog post or web page, you need to create a similar (although less detailed) map using headings and subheadings. 

So, if you were writing about vegan diets–perhaps focussing on protein–you could write out a “map” ahead of time that goes from general to more specific, then use that as your guide for writing: 

Flowchart showing how to structure headings in a document, from Heading 1 to Heading 4.

This is a pretty rudimentary and not entirely complete example, but it demonstrates how to structure content and why that is important: site visitors can easily see what’s covered and quickly move to the part they want to read.

And, because the headings are hierarchical–a fact usually indicated on websites by the size of the headings relative to each other–readers get a better sense of how each section connects to the other. It’s all about creating an organizational structure, just like in a library. 

When adding a page or post to your site, be sure to use heading tags to denote the level of heading. Search engines use heading tags to navigate a site and determine context, as do the screen readers used by people with accessibility needs. Using these hierarchical tags–in order–creates structured content that is easy for people and search engines to follow.


*As someone with a degree in library and information science, I am extremely biased toward librarians but, honestly, the things we learn in library school about organizing information have many applications across many fields including copywriting. 


Photo by Michaela Murphy on Unsplash.

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