A clear taxonomy keeps your content organized and allows your audience to easily find your content through either the navigation structure on your website or through onsite search. Digital taxonomists and metadata or cataloging librarians employ knowledge management and organization based on the same information sciences theories, but the applications and environments in which they work can vary widely. This interesting topic came to us from the University of Tennessee in their article, “What’s a Digital Taxonomist?“
In her book, “The Accidental Taxonomist”, Heather Hedden sums up being a taxonomist: “The heart of being a taxonomist is dealing with concepts, figuring out what words are best to describe them, and determining how best to relate and arrange the concepts so that people can find the information they are seeking. The task requires a degree of logic as one must scrupulously analyze relationships between terms. It is neither entirely technical/mathematical nor entirely linguistic but a little of each.”
With the advent of the digital age, there’s been an explosion of digital content and taxonomy functionalities have expanded greatly, building on traditional information sciences skills and theories to make digital information more searchable. Digital taxonomists are the people who make sure all that information can be found by the right audience.
Melody K. Smith
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