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By Karen Loasby
'Taxonomist'
is one of the more specialist information management careers. How
do you get started in this profession? We asked four taxonomists
- Heather Hedden, Helen Lippell, Dorothy Tuma and Stephen
D'Arcy- to tell us their career stories.
Heather's Story
'My career
started in writing and editing. In 1993 I responded to a job notice
in Foster City, California, near where I was living then, for an
abstractor at the computer magazine publisher, Ziff Communications,
not realizing that at the time that Ziff owned a large periodical
indexing division called Information Access Company (later Gale, now
a part of Cengage Learning).
It turned out that the abstractors
did the indexing as well, so after an intense 6-week employee
training on indexing I started out with my first exposure to
controlled vocabularies. After indexing trade journals for a couple
of years I decided to move upward into the controlled vocabulary
management group and soon forgot about abstracting. In addition
to maintaining and updating the topical terms and name authorities,
special projects included converting the vocabularies, originally
based on Library of Congress Subject Headings, into a true thesaurus,
mapping our vocabularies to those of third party vendors, and
developing new hierarchical taxonomies for specific market search
products.
After my position was eliminated in
2004, I turned to contracting, at first indexing, but then I
gradually found taxonomy work. Now living in the Boston area (where I
grew up), I got in touch with the taxonomy
consultant Seth Earley, and did some contract work for him.
His varied corporate clients require taxonomies for Web
sites, intranets, and content management systems. Then I was
recruited as the taxonomist for an enterprise search and discovery
software company called Viziant (an unsuccessful startup). My
experience working on varied taxonomies-periodical index
vocabularies, enterprise taxonomies, and taxonomies for
auto-categorization and search-gave me the breadth of understanding
to create a continuing education online course that I have been
teaching through Simmons College Graduate School of Library and
Information Science. A book is forthcoming.'
Stephen's Story
'When
I graduated from library school 14 years ago, Microsoft launched
Internet Explorer 1.0 with its Windows 95 operating system and my
first professional role, as an assistant librarian at The Ministry of
Fisheries and Food (MAFF)-- now DEFRA-- was just rolling out email in
our department. Library school hadn't prepared me for any of this!
Contracting was the quickest way
to start earning a living and to pick up new skills and experience so
when, after 8 months with MAFF, I was offered the chance to learn how
to Index in the POLIS unit, at The House of Commons library, I jumped
at the chance. Here was ‘old school' indexing and abstracting,
done by information professionals, on paper and typed up by
secretaries. In those days, none of my work was passed up to the
secretaries until it was checked and double checked and I was
delighted when, after 6 months of training, I was deemed a fully
trained indexer.
It wasn't until my next role as a
senior indexing developer for the Financial Time's ‘World
Reporter' news database project that I came across the term
‘taxonomy' for the first time, to describe the classification
schemes we were writing to automate the indexing process. We were
using indexing software from a US company called Verity, now part of
Autonomy, and when we first met the sales guys they asked which one
of us was the ‘Information Architect' and which one the
‘Information Engineer' we fell about
laughing!
Today,
of course, these terms are commonplace, in
fact, the role of an Information Architect seems to cover a broad
range of skills, experience and qualifications, from data modelling,
taxonomy creation, wire framing and user centric design.
It'san indication, I suppose, of how far we've come
recently.
Since the FT, I have worked for
two banks, a university, a council, three
software companies and two healthcare
organisations. I've developed
taxonomies, datasets, ontologies, file plans, classification schemes
and a symbology databases for a range of Web, Information/Records or
Knowledge management related projects.
It was never my intention to
pursue a taxonomist vocation. One job
tended to lead to another but I am happy to have found a speciality I
enjoy, as it gives me the opportunity to work for any type of
industry, anywhere in the country, on a broad range information/data
management related projects.'
Dorothy's story
'I
didn't come to my career in taxonomy by design.
My first avocation was photography,
and my undergraduate degree in photojournalism was excellent
preparation for a life of capturing life's rich pageant on camera,
a plan thwarted only by my fear of taking pictures of people I didn't
know. With that career out of the running, I decided to go to art
school and explore a different way of making and working with images.
In addition to abetting my creative
avocations, getting my MFA taught me to think about concepts,
meaning, semantics, aboutness, and implicit versus explicit meaning.
(These topics starting to sound familiar, anyone?) My first job after
graduate school was as a research assistant at a well-known
photography collection and my love of that experience steered me
toward working with image collections and archives.
Next, I worked at an art museum,
then the photo library of a major newspaper, and finally landed at a
groundbreaking provider of online media. Soon I found myself dealing
with a digital revolution and all the search challenges that came
along with it: How to determine what a digitized image was about?
What kind of searches were our customers doing? How to create
hierarchies that reflected semantic gaps within other languages? What
was the best way to map assets with data from non-standardized
cataloging systems? In short, a taxonomist's dream job.
Getting a master's in Information
Management in the midst of these challenges further drew me into this
rapidly evolving and stimulating field. What more could I ask? The
field attracts intense and interesting people. It requires right- and
left-brain thinking. Most of all, it requires problem-solving and a
passion to discover the best ways to get information to users.
Perhaps I took an unusual journey to get here, but I'm glad I've
arrived.'
Helen's story
'I
started my career without a clear idea of what I wanted to do, but
was lucky enough to start working life in the Financial Times. One of
my very first tasks was to cut out articles from newspapers, stick
them on a piece of paper and fax them to clients. I got blisters on
my hands from using scissors all day, but it sparked a passion for
information and findability, and I've never really looked back.
I then moved onto the manual
indexing operation, applying index terms from taxonomies onto news
articles. The articles came from sources across the world, and I
enjoyed the challenge of working out what would be the best index
terms to apply. I then moved onto working on the automatic indexing
of the content, to provide the scale and consistency that humans
couldn't provide (manual indexers continued to work on high value
news sources such as UK newspapers). I also discovered an interest in
taxonomies and vowed to pursue that.
Next up was a short contract at the
BBC creating a taxonomy of UK place names. The place names were
sourced from a third party but the structure and effort to
disambiguate them were all my own work, and I had a ball. I enjoyed
creating an artefact that was going to be used in a new content
management system where metadata was key to its potential.
I returned to the BBC shortly
after this, and straight away got to play with a large taxonomy that
powered the recommended links system of BBC Search. Again I enjoyed
working with a complex product to try and improve the experience for
search users and to ensure that great Web content could be found.
I'm now at Directgov, developing
taxonomies and metadata that will underpin the next phases of the
Website, creating intuitive navigation and search, and laying
foundations for the challenges of the semantic Web.
I have had strange looks when I tell
people I'm a taxonomist, but once we get past the "is it stuffing
animals?" conversation, I like to tell them that the job is about
problem-solving, product design, user experience, playing with
language and many other things. Whatever ups and downs I've had,
I've never been bored by the work I do.'
By Karen Loasby
Karen Loasby is the Information Architect for the RNIB (Royal
National Institute of Blind People). She is currently absorbed in
issues of accessibility, SharePoint and intranets.
Prior to
joining the RNIB, Karen was Information Architecture Team Leader at the
BBC, managing a team of 16 information architects. During seven years
at the BBC, she worked on search, content management, automatic
indexing and the award winning 2008 homepage redesign.
She writes about information architecture and occasionally her two chickens at www.iaplay.com.
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