'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.'
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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'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.
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