Insight Into a Taxonomist

June 17, 2022 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Insight Into a Taxonomist

Helen Lippell, a taxonomist, consultant and author, was recently interviewed about her “off the beaten” career path. Like so many in this field, it wasn’t the original destination. This interesting topic came to us from Research Information in their article, “A Mastermind of taxonomy.”

Starting out with an academic background of Latin and Economics, her first job after university was as a manual indexer of news information from all over the world. Applying tags to give power to words and phrases and improve their findability, was likely the first taste of classification that caught her attention.

Like so many information science professionals, a taxonomist typically specializes in a genre, subject or industry. And, like any library, taxonomy is only as good as its librarians. 

Metadata makes digital content findable. However, findability works only when a proper taxonomy is in place. Proper indexing against a strong standards-based taxonomy increases the findability of data. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.

Melody K. Smith

Data Harmony is an award-winning semantic suite that leverages explainable AI.

Sponsored by Data Harmony, harmonizing knowledge for a better search experience.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.