Research for
cultural infrastructure
Before African Music Library existed as a website, it existed as a question at Josplay: how do you structure the world's most comprehensive knowledge base of African music so people can actually use it? As a side project, I took on the foundational research: the user stories, the entity model, the information architecture, and the critical flows. The platform you can visit today grew out of that groundwork.
The artifact that framed the whole exploration: one search field, ten kinds of knowledge behind it.
A library with no building yet📋
Structure a knowledge base for African music
First, the library.🎶
African music is rich, and it is chronically misdocumented. Metadata is scattered, inconsistent, or missing entirely, which keeps African artists undercounted in the digital economy and keeps students and researchers working far harder than they should.
Josplay set out to close that gap with African Music Library: a knowledge base of African music built by musicologists, engineers, and literary experts, spanning artists, bands, genres, instruments, scholarship, and more.
This research came first. When I did this work, the platform did not exist yet. The library that is live today at africanmusiclibrary.org grew out of this structural groundwork, then was designed and built by the Josplay team.
Rich collections. No obvious front door.🚪
A library is easy to fill and hard to enter. The more comprehensive the collection becomes, the harder the entry question gets. Straight from the wall:
A student cramming for an assignment, a musicologist tracing a genre, a curious listener, a developer calling an API. Different vocabularies, different definitions of "found it."
An artist belongs to a genre, plays an instrument, signs to a label, shows up in a journal. When every entity links to every other, where does navigation begin??
Subscriptions and API tiers fund the work. Put the gate one step too early and the library stops feeling like a library.
The question was never "what should the screens look like." It was: what is the shape of the knowledge, and how do different people walk through it?
Start with the people👥
I worked in four moves: write the user stories, name the entities, structure the architecture, then walk the critical journeys as flows. Screens came last, in low fidelity, because every earlier decision constrains them. The stories came first.
"As a busy undergraduate studying music, I want access to a library of African music resources so I can complete assignments, projects, and personal learning."
Enters through search. Success = a citable source in minutes.
"I'm tracing how highlife moved between countries and decades. I need the connections, not just the entries."
Enters through an entity, follows the links. Success = lineage they can verify.
"I'm building with African music data. I need clean, documented endpoints before I commit."
Enters through API docs. Success = a first successful call.
three visitors, three doors... one library
Name what the library holds🏷️
Before pages, an inventory. Everything in the library resolves to one of a small set of entities, and every later structure hangs off them. These names become the navigation, the filters, the search categories, and the API's nouns.
the ten categories in the search bar map straight onto these
Give the knowledge a structure🌳
The architecture answers the entry question three ways at once: search for people who know what they want, browsable resource sections for people who don't yet, and dedicated paths for research, pricing, and the API. The same entities appear at every level, so wherever you enter, the vocabulary is familiar.
The information architecture, condensed from my board. Scroll sideways to walk the full width of the library.
Walk the critical journey🚶🏾♀️
The flow that matters most is the student's: from opening the library to holding a usable source. The single hardest decision in it is where the subscription gate sits. I placed it after the first taste of value, at the moment of committing to a resource, never before search. Discovery stays open; depth sustains the library.
also mapped: account creation (phone or email verification → security checklist) and the forgotten PIN recovery path... no dead ends survive on paper
The smallest project. The clearest window.🎯
This project shows how I think when nothing exists yet. No inherited patterns, no live traffic, no screens to critique. Just a domain worth caring about and the discipline of structuring it before drawing it.
It began as side research for Josplay. Today, the library it helped shape is live.