Getting Work as a Taxonomist

Occasionally, people whom I don't know ask me for career advice in the field of taxonomies, but this is not easy to answer. For taxonomy work, career paths and prior experiences vary, employers span all industries and organization types, job titles and descriptions are not named consistently, and remote jobs are very competitive.

Two chapters in my book, The Accidental Taxonomist, 3rd ed., can help answer career questions, Chapter 2 “Who are Taxonomists” and Chapter 13 “Taxonomy Work and Profession.” However, I have some additional thoughts, which I am sharing here.

Varied taxonomy career paths

When someone asks me for advice on getting into taxonomy work, especially based on my own experience, I am somewhat dismissive, since no one will repeat my career path. I got into controlled vocabulary/taxonomy management work starting out as an indexer using the controlled vocabularies at a periodical article publisher. Not only is such a company rare and industry unusual, but now there are extremely few manual periodical/database indexers, since the task is increasingly done automatically (auto-tagging, auto-classification, text analytics, AI, etc.)

The following are some of the common paths towards taxonomy careers I have seen, and there are many others that are less common.

• Library/information science > cataloging > metadata
• Arts, photography, film, media > digital asset management > asset metadata
• Technical writing > technical content management > content strategy
• Marketing > web content management > content strategy
• Languages > linguistics > natural language processing > auto-tagging
• Languages > translation > terminology management
• Business management > knowledge management

Of course, in any of the above career paths, one does not have to change careers to become a taxonomist but could merely add taxonomy tasks to an existing job or career. This is especially the case of the following career backgrounds, in which people may add taxonomy work/projects to an existing technical role:

• Science/engineering > technical terminology and glossary management
• Computer science/data science > ontologies
• Information technology > content management system/SharePoint administration

Taxonomy job search challenges

It’s typical to search for taxonomy jobs on the major job search websites, such as LinkedIn and Indeed. But not all taxonomy jobs have “taxonomist” or “taxonomy” in the job title. They could have job titles instead for ontology/ontologist, information architecture/architect, metadata, content management/manger, data governance, etc. So, then a search could be on “taxonomy” in the job description rather than limited to the job title, but this results in many more irrelevant jobs that merely touch on taxonomies but don’t involve developing/managing taxonomies.

Taxonomist jobs are relatively rare compared to traditional jobs. Limiting a job search to a specific metropolitan area will yield few, if any, relevant results. The exceptions, where taxonomist jobs are more frequent tend to be Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, New York, and Washington, DC. Taxonomist jobs in other countries exist but are less common than in the United States.  Expanding a job search to all jobs mentioning “taxonomy” in the description, not just the job title, and expanding it to all of the United States will retrieve too many results, but this is a good approach to take in other countries. There is the added complication that “taxonomist” job searches can retrieve jobs postings for biologist-taxonomists.

Fortunately, many taxonomist jobs are remote.  The downside to this, though, is that fully remote taxonomist job postings attract a high number of applicants, so the competition for such jobs is great. Where LinkedIn indicates the number of people who click on an application link on a job post, remote taxonomist jobs have received over 100 applicant clicks in just a couple of days. 

A significant number of taxonomist jobs are temporary contracts, which are hired through recruiting firms. This is an option for someone not currently employed, but, obviously it's not a good idea to leave a permanent job for a temporary one. 

Networking, which is always important for job searching, is especially valuable in the unusual field of taxonomies. Joining professional associations, attending conferences and meetups, and developing a large network and posting on LinkedIn are all recommended.

Taxonomy skills and skills acquisition

There is not a standard set of skills for a taxonomist, other than prior taxonomy experience. Positions may ask for additional skills in varied areas:  

• experience with content management systems, digital asset management systems, or product information management systems
• familiarity with AI, machine learning, natural language processing, auto-classification, etc.
• experience working with large datasets
• experience designing ontologies and working with knowledge graphs
• technical skills with using SPARQL, SQL, and Python

Furthermore, positions may also ask for experience with specific taxonomy management software or specific subject domain knowledge (e.g. finance or healthcare). As a result, it’s rare for one applicant to meet all the experience and skills required. Applicants understand this and may apply anyway.

Taxonomy jobs and the skills expected in such jobs vary. Thus, to become a highly competent taxonomist generally requires experience from multiple different employers. I have learned a great deal having done different kinds of taxonomy work for different companies. It can be difficult to get the first taxonomist job, though. The best approach is to obtain taxonomy work, such as through a project, while in a role that is not a dedicated taxonomist. A lot of taxonomy work is done as part of a job that has other duties.

However, a single taxonomy project as part of a job is often not enough experience to jump to a dedicated taxonomist position. Some training to round out one’s knowledge and to fill in the gaps is highly beneficial. In addition to the information in my book, The Accidental Taxonomist, I teach various taxonomy training workshops. 

Coming up next, I will teach a full-day in-person workshop “Connecting Users to Content through Taxonomies: An Introduction to Taxonomy Design & Creation” on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm in Philadelphia, as a pre-conference workshop to the Information Architecture Conference (with separate registration, not requiring full conference attendance).

Learning to Create Taxonomies

Knowledge of what taxonomies are, what they are for, and how they are used is quite widespread, even if there are uncertainties and disagreements around the definition of “taxonomy.” People who often look up digital information are familiar with various presentations of taxonomies for selecting terms linked to content. These include hierarchical trees of topic and subtopics to browse, scroll boxes of controlled terms, type-ahead or search-suggest terms that appear below a search box after the first few letters are typed into the box, and terms or named entities grouped by various aspect types (facets) in the left margin to select from in order to limit/refine/filter search results.

Why Learn Taxonomy Creation

There is a big difference, however, between being able to use taxonomies and being able to create taxonomies.

While it is usually best to leave taxonomy creation to the experts, taxonomists are not always available, or the needed taxonomy may be small or apparently “simple,” so it may not be economical to hire a contract taxonomist or a consultant. In other situations, the taxonomy subject may be quite technical, and it would seem preferable to have subject matter experts, rather than an external taxonomist, create the taxonomy.  Thus, people who are not professional taxonomists often create taxonomies.

Generative AI now makes it easier for anyone to “generate” a taxonomy. However, the knowledge of taxonomy principles is needed to make necessary corrections and edit the taxonomy to achieve a decent level of quality. Generative AI should not be used to fully create a taxonomy (which could in fact be extracting published taxonomies violating their copyright), but rather it may be a used as a tool facilitate parts of the taxonomy creation process. (See my post “Taxonomies and ChatGPT.”) The technology thus makes it easier to create taxonomies for those who are not taxonomists and have limited time for taxonomy creation tasks.

There is also the matter of taxonomy maintenance. After a contract taxonomist or consultant creates a taxonomy and leaves, the taxonomy still needs to be kept up to date, with new concepts added and others changed, and over time expanded. While documentation and guidelines written by a taxonomy consultant are helpful, a good understanding of taxonomy creation principles is also needed by anyone responsible for expanding or maintaining a taxonomy.

Finally, taxonomy creation is a collaborative effort, involving stakeholders in various roles (project management, content management, digital asset management, information technology tagging, research, user experience, search, etc.) who are invited to contribute their perspectives. Stakeholders can provide better insights to a taxonomy if they have a better understanding of taxonomy principles. Taxonomy project managers in particular need to understand taxonomy creation even if they are not doing the actual taxonomy creation work.

How to Learn Taxonomy Creation

Fortunately, there are many resources to learn the principles and standards of taxonomy design and creation. There is, of course, my book, The Accidental Taxonomist, which, as the name implies, is intended for anyone who finds themselves, perhaps by “accident” in a position that requires them to create, edit, or manage taxonomies.

There are also various half-day and full-day workshops at conferences, virtual short courses through professional associations and other organizations, and asynchronous online training. These usually involve some exercises for practice and provide the appropriate amount of training for getting started with creating taxonomies. I’ve offered various kinds of training, both independently and through other organizations, over the years. My current course offerings are on my website

Upcoming Taxonomy Courses

The next live (virtual) course I will offer is a new course called “Controlled Vocabularies and Taxonomies”  offered through HS Events, on GoToWebinar over four weekly sessions from February 29 though March 27. I will teach this course live (with ample time for Q&A) just once, after which it will become available as a recording for purchase.

HS (Henry Stewart) Events are best known for their dominance in the field of digital asset management (DAM), but the course I will teach is not limited to DAM professionals. Actually, this course is most appropriate for the expanding scope of HS Events, which will introduce a Semantic Data conference event, which includes the subject of taxonomies, co-located with its DAM conferences in London and in New York in 2024.

The first session is an introduction to the definitions, types, uses, benefits, and standards for taxonomies. The second deals with project management side of planning and researching for creating controlled vocabularies and taxonomies. The third session gets into the details of creating terms and relationships. Finally, the fourth session takes up design and implementation issues. After this course takes place, the recordings will be available for purchase for on-demand viewing.

Then in June, I will be teaching a three part, weekly, course "Taxonomy Creation for Content Tagging" through the Society for Technical Communication (STC), so the focus is taxonomies to make documents/documentation more findable, but it is also suitable for anyone interested in learning how to create taxonomies. It will be offered on Zoom on Thursday afternoons, 4:00 – 5:30 pm EDT, June 11, 18, and 25, and the Moodle learning management system is used for additional asynchronous discussion and access to resource. Interactive exercises and live Q&A are included. I had taught this course for the first time last year, but due to my increasingly busy consulting work schedule, I do not plan to teach this course again after this June. More details are on the Interactive Virtual Taxonomy Workshop page my website.

In the future, check for my current training offerings on the Taxonomy Courses & Workshops page of my Hedden Information Management website.

Who Should Create Taxonomies?

More and more organizations of various types and sizes are recognizing the benefits of information/content taxonomies, to make it easier to more accurately and quickly find information, be recommended information, and be able to formulate complex queries of data.  

In many cases, however, where taxonomies are not central to the product/service of a company (such as e-commerce retail or information publishing) or function of an organization (such as research), the task of creating and maintaining a taxonomy is not big enough to justify hiring a professional taxonomist. Creating a taxonomy is a temporary project, and then updating it is often a part-time task, which could even be shared among several people.

Taxonomy creation should not be underestimated, however. It may appear easy to create a taxonomy, but it is not easy to create a good taxonomy. If a taxonomy is not well-designed it cannot serve its purpose well. You may as well rely on a search engine alone than try to utilize a bad taxonomy.

Not creating the taxonomy yourself

Some approaches to developing a taxonomy without a dedicated taxonomist include using existing taxonomies, creating a taxonomy by term extraction, or hiring a consultant.

Reusing existing taxonomies

To serve its purpose best, a taxonomy should be custom-created to serve its content, users, and system. An existing external taxonomy is usually not adequate. It may be suitable for limited scope of a geographic taxonomy, industrial classification, a list of organization names, a list of languages. More information about licensing taxonomies is in my blog post “Taxonomy Licensing”  Even when using an existing taxonomy, there is still work to edit and adapt the external taxonomy, which requires taxonomy expertise

Creating a taxonomy by automatically extracting terms from content

Software, including some taxonomy management software, such as PoolParty, can extract candidate taxonomy terms from a body of content (documents or web pages) that is intended to be tagged with the taxonomy. This is an effective method to enhance a taxonomy, to add missing concepts and alternative labels (synonyms). However, this is not a practical way to start creating a taxonomy, which requires a logical structure. Taxonomy-creation expertise is still needed.

Hiring a taxonomy consulting or temporary contractor

This is a good idea. A consultant or contractor will provide a combination of guidance and actual taxonomy building, although a consultant tends to provide more guidance, and a contractor tends to do more taxonomy building. A contractor requires a certain time commitment, such as 3-6 months full-time, whereas there is lots of flexibility in engaging a consultant. After the consultant or contractor is finished, though, someone needs to maintain and update the taxonomy to the same specifications.

When a taxonomy is not very large, it may be more efficient and cost-effective to create it from scratch oneself without reusing an existing taxonomy or relying on a consultant or contractor, although getting a consultant to at least review the taxonomy might still be a good idea.

Taxonomy management as part of a role

What is much more common for an organization than to have a taxonomist is to have one or more positions where taxonomy management is part of the job description. Searches on web job boards return hundreds of job opening with “taxonomy” in the job description, whereas only a small fraction of them have taxonomy or taxonomist in the job title. Common job titles include:  Content Designer, Content Manager, Content Strategist, Data Architect, Data Catalog…, Data Strategist, Digital Asset Manager, Digital Content…, Digital Librarian, Information Architect, Information Scientist, Knowledge Engineer, Knowledge Management…, Metadata Specialist, Product Manager, SharePoint Developer, Solutions Architect, etc. There are also positions more centered in marketing and in web development.

Often, though, the need for a taxonomy emerges at a time when a new position is not created, so an existing employee must take on the task. This common scenario is behind the title of my book and this blog, The Accidental Taxonomist. Those that take on taxonomy work may come from a wide variety of roles or departments including marketing for a website taxonomy, IT or human resources for an intranet taxonomy, IT for content/document management systems administration, and technical documentation/publishing. Knowledge management and metadata/data management are also good candidate roles for taxonomy management.

In situations where the taxonomy is used to manage and retrieve content in specialized subject areas, subject matter experts may also be involved in taxonomy creation, at least for the parts of the taxonomy that correspond to their expertise. 

Not having sufficient taxonomy skills

In either case, whether taxonomy management was originally part of the job description or not, people who assume partial taxonomy responsibilities often do not have the skills. This is usually the case when a taxonomy project first arises. Even when someone is newly hired, successful applicants may not to meet all job description duties, such as taxonomy experience, especially if the skill is only a minor part of the job.

Related job skills may make it easier to created taxonomies, but without experience or training, one cannot simply create a good taxonomy. Related skills tend to be in the area of library/information science, indexing, information architecture, digital asset management, content management, records management, and possibly product management.

Librarians tend to have training in cataloging and classification, sometimes in thesaurus creation, and less likely in taxonomy creation. Taxonomies resemble classification schemes, but function differently, so it would be a mistake to model a taxonomy as a classification scheme. See my blog post "Classification Systems vs. Taxonomies." I had taught a continuing education course on taxonomies through a graduate school of library and information science for years, since MLIS graduates had not learned taxonomies as part of their degree program.

Information architects know how to organize information in a web user interface well, so they may have a good sense on how to structure a taxonomy at a high level. However, there are details and nuances of a large taxonomy, such as the development of synonyms/alternative labels, with which they may not have experience. Also, a taxonomy should not be confused with a navigation scheme, as explained my blog post "Navigation Schemes vs. Taxonomies."

Digital asset managers, content managers, and product managers know about the metadata management for their content, and taxonomies usually fit into the larger metadata scheme. However, their experience with taxonomy creation is usually limited to a subject area and the context and constraints of the system in which they are working. So, the very basic taxonomy skills that they develop may not be transferable to another system or another subject domain.

Subject matter or domain experts, including product managers, often play an important role in taxonomy development. From my experience in working with subject matter experts, though, they often tend to design more of a classification scheme for their domain and create taxonomy concepts that are too granular to be practical for end-using search and retrieval.

Where to learn taxonomy skills

There are many continuing education options to learn taxonomy creation, some through library/information science schools, some through professional associations, and some through commercial conference and training programs. I have been providing taxonomy training since 2007, through online courses, conference workshops, and corporate workshops, both in-person and virtual. I have been impressed with the diversity of backgrounds, job roles, organization types, and global locations of the workshop participants over the years.

I teach various online and in-person workshops. The latest information is on my website page Courses and Workshops.

Upcoming in fall 2021:

"Knowledge Engineering of Taxonomies, Thesauri, and Ontologies"
SEMANTiCS conference, Amsterdam, Monday September 6, 9:00 am - 12:30 Central European Time. Available both online and in-person.

"Taxonomy and Metadata Design"
Monday-Tuesday, October 11-12, 8:00am - 12:00pm EDT (14:00 - 18:00 CEST) each day (8 hours over two days)
Through Technology Transfer, Rome (with the availability simultaneous interpretation into Italian).

Onsite Corporate Taxonomy Training

I enjoy teaching about taxonomies. The feedback I get from my students or workshop participants helps me improve my methods of communication, teaching, and consulting, and I learn about the varied implementations of taxonomies. The courses evolve and improve over time.  I teach online courses, conference workshops, and corporate onsite workshops. I’ve been making enhancements to the latter offering and this week led a  two-day onsite workshop at a major company on the West Coast.

Accommodating a varied audience

 

The participants in my “introductory” workshops, whether at conferences or at their corporate offices, have varied knowledge and experience with taxonomies. Some are complete beginners and are curious to learn about taxonomies and what they can do. Others have been tasked to build a taxonomy with little instruction and are looking for best practices and guidelines. Some of have read my book but have not had the opportunity to put what they have read into practice, so the workshop’s exercises are very helpful. Finally, some participants are experienced taxonomists seeking to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

The absolute beginners may feel overwhelmed at the amount of information on taxonomies presented in one of my workshops, but I feel it’s important to provide enough instruction to enable people to actually create basic taxonomies (while ideally still getting feedback from someone more experienced). Also, I expect people to combine instruction from my workshop with other methods of learning taxonomies, such as reading my book, taking my online course, attending conference session on taxonomies, or getting advice from a taxonomist in their organization. While I would like to offer a more advanced workshops, it’s difficult to find enough experienced practicing taxonomists at the same location. (At a conference is possible, but sometimes conference organizers equate advanced taxonomy topics with ontologies.)

Interactive exercises

 

Workshop participants doing a card-sorting exercise

Participants like interactive or hands-on exercises. One of the learning benefits of my onsite workshops is that they include interactive exercises that involve the entire group or class. My online course includes exercises or assignment to learn from the practice and from feedback I provide, but only the onsite workshops offer the opportunity to work on assignments with others and thus learn from others. Creating taxonomies, like designing websites or software user interfaces, needs to consider different views and is somewhat subjective. The classroom setting offers the opportunity to learn from others. 

Small-group exercises are the best for this kind of learning. My full-length workshops include small-group exercises for designing a set of facets and for doing a card-sorting exercise to categorize topics. Groups may comprise from three to six participants, depending on the total number. In addition to hearing ideas from their group members, participants then share the resulting taxonomy outline to the larger class, and I provide comments. Even exercises that do not involve small groups, but are assignments to consider and shout out answers, are beneficial, because we obtain, discuss, and evaluate various answers beyond the answers that any one individual might consider.

Remote participation is also possible, especially if the remote participants are co-located in the same office. They can form their own small group for the small group exercises, and they can do the card-sorting exercise online. This was the case in my latest corporate workshop.

Customizing corporate workshops

 

To what extent I should customize the workshops for a specific organization was a question when I first offered corporate workshops. It’s not necessary, nor worth the time, to customize every example of taxonomy terms in the workshop presentation with something from the client’s domain of content. Rather, I found that it is sufficient yet instructive to customize just a few slides, such as those with examples of content types and use cases.

Another way I customize the workshops is by the outline and topics included. While all workshops include the basics (taxonomy types, definitions, uses and benefits, standards, structural design, best practices for creating terms and relationships, and governance), optional topics include: user interface display options, metadata and taxonomies, testing taxonomies, tagging, mapping taxonomies, multilingual taxonomies, integration with search, and taxonomy management software.

Finally, I customize the group exercises so that the choices for topics for facets would be applicable, and the card-sorting exercise may take an actual example especially if the client has a public taxonomy I can use as a basis for the exercise. I also include discussion questions, so that the participants can share and discuss the taxonomy issues as pertinent to their organization. In any case, I sign an NDA, so the client can comfortably share information with me which I may sue in the workshop.

Continuous improvement 

 

I found that asking the client for some input on possible customization, I can also generalize the issues to enhance the workshop presentation for future use. In other words, the client input on “customization” is not always that, but rather leads to a general improvement. The result has been to make the workshop presentation based more on real-world scenarios and less theoretical than my previous conference presentations. I actually did not consider my conference presentations to be that theoretical in the first place (since, after all, my knowledge of taxonomies is based on my work experience, not on studies for a degree in library/information science). But now I have made the workshops even more practical. 

Input from the client can also lead to topics for clarification, such as differing use of terminology. For example, a client wanted me to discuss taxonomy “mapping,” which we taxonomists understand to mean the creation of equivalence links between terms in one taxonomy and another, so that one taxonomy may be used to retrieve content that was tagged in the other taxonomy. However, what my client meant by “mapping” was a kind of “see also” related-term relationships between terms in two different taxonomies. Now I know to clarify and discuss both kinds of links between taxonomies.

Just as I am an accidental taxonomist and then an accidental consultant, so am I now also an accidental trainer. Details of my corporate training offerings are on my website. 

Taxonomy Courses

Note: Since this blog post was written, Simmons College discontinued its continuing education program. I am now offering the 5-week online workshop, previously offered through Simmons, independently through Hedden Information Management. Information is at: http://www.hedden-information.com/courses-workshops/taxonomy-course/

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I have been teaching workshops on how to create taxonomies for over seven years. Coming up in the winter and spring of 2015 I am offering more kinds of workshops and learning options than ever before. I had offered customized corporate onsite workshops in the past, but since I don’t have the time for that any more, it makes sense to accept opportunities to offer general training in taxonomies. I don’t intend to offer directly competing course offerings, so this blog post aims to outline the differences between these various taxonomy courses.

The differences are primarily in learning approach (online or in-person, synchronous or asynchronous), the depth of instruction, cost, and convenience. The audience focus of each is not substantially different. The level in most cases is primarily “advanced beginner.” Prior exposure or use of taxonomies, general training in library/information science, and/or work in related fields such as information architecture, metadata, records management, indexing, content management, digital asset management, etc., is highly beneficial. No such background, however, does not preclude participation, but may make it a little more challenging. Prior experience in creating or editing taxonomies, on the other hand, does not necessarily make you too advance for the classes, as your experience may be limited to just one kind of taxonomy. The only difference is the SLA full-day course, which is aimed more directly at beginners. The workshops are also suitable for both practitioners and managers.

Simmons College School of Library and Information Science continuing education workshop

5-week online workshop with next available session in March 2015, and likely another two or three times later in the year.  Description, Registration
Benefits:
- Individual feedback on submitted assignments.
- Simmons College certificate and record of completion
- Access to free trial of taxonomy management software which you could not get on your own (in - additional to others, which you could get a 30-day trial on your own)
- Opportunity to email questions and get answers
- Greater learning opportunity through assignments and feedback and more material to read
Disadvantages:
- Limited space, usually filling up a month or more in advance (January 2015 session filled)
- A greater total time commitment and over a specific period of time
- Inability to easily save formatted lessons. While you can copy lesson content for your own purposes, the Moodle platform does not offer an easy way to save lessons in the original formatting.

American Society for Indexing Online Learning: “Practical Taxonomy Creation”

Three weekly one-hour sessions, January 14, 21, and 28, 2015, and/or recordings, Description, Registration
Benefits:
- Live phone Q&A
- Unlimited capacity. Sign up at the last minute and still get in. Or register after the live session for access to the recording.
- Limited time commitment
- Option to attend some live and some as recording, if not all sessions fit in your schedule.
- Access to the presentation and recording for unlimited repeated viewings/listening
Disadvantages:
- No individualized assignment feedback
- Topics that are not core not covered due to limited time
- Less learning time (excluding webinar replays)
- Limited time for questions

American Society for Indexing conference 3-hour workshop: “Topics in Taxonomy Creation”

Either April 30 or May 1 (TBD) in Seattle, WA, Description, Registration
Benefits:
- In-person learning experience
- Personal connection with me the instructor and other participants for better networking
- May interrupt the presentation with questions (unlike the webinar in which you must wait for the Q&A time)
- Live demos of taxonomy management software
- Copy of the slides and handouts to keep
Disadvantages:
- Travel time and costs to Seattle
- Required registration for conference (no separate workshop registration)
- Limited instruction time and content

SLA conference full-day (8 hours) conference continuing education workshop: “Introduction to Taxonomy”

Saturday, June 13, 2013, Boston, MA, Description, Registration
Benefits:
- Appropriate for complete beginners
- In-person learning experience
- Personal connection with me the instructor and other participants for better networking
- May interrupt the presentation with questions (unlike the webinar in which you must wait for the Q&A time)
- Live demos of taxonomy management software
- Copy of the slides and handouts to keep
- Ample live Q&A time
- Discounted student and retired SLA member pricing
Disadvantages:
- Travel time and costs to Boston
- A lot of material to digest if a short period of time

Why learn about taxonomies? It is a key tool/method/component of knowledge management and information management.

Mentoring Taxonomist Program

In my last blog post, I discussed the need for mentoring taxonomists and mentioned that I had volunteered to lead the new mentoring committee of the Taxonomy Division of SLA (Special Libraries Association) and establish its mentoring program (http://taxonomy.sla.org/get-involved/mentor). While some of the mentoring activities are available to members only, other mentoring services can involve anyone, so I will describe them here.

Frequently Asked Question Resources

In many cases, those new to taxonomies simply have questions about the taxonomy field. Therefore, the initial and primary activity of the SLA Taxonomy Division’s Mentoring Committee has been to develop a detailed list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and answers, which total 35 to date.

The issue as to whether the answers should be a service to Taxonomy Division members only or to public was resolved by having short answers of 1-3 sentences for the public, and longer answers of 150 – 250 words on separate web pages accessible to members only with their login. (Members also have the ability to submit additional questions to the FAQs.) The FAQs with the short answers are available under the Mentoring section of the public website: http://taxonomy.sla.org/get-involved/mentor/taxonomy-faqs

Mentor and Protégé Directories

Connecting aspiring taxonomists (whom we are calling protégés) with experienced taxonomists, who volunteer to be mentors, is another objective. While it is neither practical nor feasible for the Taxonomy Division to provide direct individual mentoring services nor match mentors to protégés, it can act as a clearinghouse in providing directories on its web site of both willing mentors and interested protégés. In the past few months, I have set up both a Mentor Directory and a Protégé Directory, and it is not required that people be listed in one directory in order to contact those listed in the other directory.

Mentor Directory

Access to mentors is, as expected, a membership benefit. Thus, the Mentor directory is accessible by membership login only. Mentors are SLA Taxonomy Division members with considerable experience in some aspect of taxonomies and are willing to volunteer limited time in mentoring for the benefit of their professional growth and prestige. Mentors listed in the Mentor Directory:

• should be available for answering specific individual questions about the taxonomy field, education/training, and job prospects, which the general FAQs cannot answer.
• probably could help out a protégé who brings his/her own project
• most likely do not have projects to offer in an internship type of relationships (but might)

Protégé Directory

Taxonomy Division members who have had at least some training or exposure to taxonomies and would like to gain the benefits of mentoring may list their names in the Protégé Directory, which is displayed on the website:
http://taxonomy.sla.org/get-involved/mentor/directory-of-proteges

Protégés seeking a mentoring relationship could be for taxonomy projects in either of the following two scenarios:

1. The protégé is looking for a temporary internship or training arrangement, expecting lower than average pay or no pay in exchange for (1) the opportunity to work without prior experience, (2) useful feedback from the supervisor-mentor, and (3) the ability to use the supervisor-mentor as a future work reference.
2. The protégé has a pending or existing taxonomy project (whether at work, a freelance project, or a volunteer project) and is seeking advice on aspects of the taxonomy design and/or feedback on initial taxonomy work.

Responses to either of these two kinds of mentoring possibilities are still expected to be relatively low, so the Taxonomy Division is permitting nonmembers who can mentor to contact listed protégés. In the case of the first scenario in particular, many qualified taxonomists who are willing to mentor, simply don’t have suitable projects or company legal permission to bring on temporary interns or subcontractors at below-market rates. Non-profit organizations, though, are more likely to have arrangements for volunteers.

Therefore, if you are looking for a taxonomist intern whom you are willing to mentor, check out the Protégé Directory. If you are looking to be mentored, then join SLA and its Taxonomy Division and list yourself in the directory.

Mentoring Taxonomists: The Need

As explained in Chapter 2 of my book on an introduction to taxonomy creation, The Accidental Taxonomist, the majority of taxonomists did not intend to be taxonomists, and they come to the field by accident from various backgrounds. What this means is that most people who find they want to or need to do work as taxonomists are already into their careers and are no longer students with access to full courses. Workshops through conferences or continuing education programs (such as the workshop I teach) are certainly very helpful, but they are of limited duration and not always available. Thus, on-the-job training or mentoring is the most likely way that many people learn how to design and create taxonomies. Just look at the LinkedIn resumes of many practicing taxonomists, and you will see that the education of the majority of them was not in library and information science but in some other field, and that through a series of jobs somehow along the way they learned taxonomy skills on the job.

Another reason why on-the-job training or mentoring is important in the taxonomy field is that taxonomy work is often quite specialized for a particular application. Taxonomies for website navigation, for ecommerce, for supporting an auto-categorization tool, for supporting human indexers, for digital asset management metadata, or for content management systems are not the same and have nuanced differences in their design aside from any subject matter differences. Taxonomy “standards” are actually just guidelines which allow flexibility. Thus, on-the-job training can be more relevant than the theoretical study of taxonomies or than a continuing education workshop that must take a generic approach to accommodate diverse students.

Not everyone is fortunate to have on-the-job training or senior colleagues or supervisors who can act as mentors. I had this opportunity, though, and in retrospect, it was the defining point in my career: the period of about three years when I worked at what was then Information Access Company, first in collaboration with and then as new member of the vocabulary management department. I got the vocabulary manager (aka taxonomist) position, as an inside hire familiar with the controlled vocabularies as an indexer, but I subsequently learned best practices for taxonomy editing and management from my senior colleagues, my supervisor, and also from a visiting consultant.

Due to the nature of the field, though, it is not unusual for the new taxonomist be the sole person responsible for taxonomies in an organization and thus lack the support of coworkers with any experience in taxonomies. The new taxonomist must then look elsewhere for mentoring support. Online discussion groups can provide some support in answering simple questions, as long as the assistance does not require anyone else to actually look at the work. A hired taxonomy consultant can also serve as an excellent mentor if you structure the relationship in that way, although this may not be in your budget. Another place to turn for mentoring assistance could be professional associations.

Thus, I accepted when asked last year if I would volunteer to lead the new mentoring committee of the Taxonomy Division of SLA (Special Libraries Association), a professional membership association to which I belong.  Saying that I support mentoring and actually trying to create and foster a mentoring program, however, are quite different matters.  The Taxonomy Division chair at the time suggested creating a list of FAQs and answers on the member website as the primary means of mentoring members. While FAQs are a useful resource, this is not what I had in mind for mentoring. Connecting aspiring taxonomists (protégés) with experienced taxonomists who volunteer to be mentors would be ideal. Whether this is an achievable ideal or not still waits to be seen.  For now, I have set up the structure of the mentoring programs, as described on the SLA Taxonomy Division website. Now, we just need to encourage participation. My next blog post will describe the program in more detail.

Taxonomy Training Workshops

I give a workshop in creating taxonomies in two formats, full-day in person and online.  The question sometimes comes up from prospective participants as to the differences. Since a full-day onsite workshop is coming up soon, this would be a good time to address the similarities and differences.

Both workshops cover essentially the same content with a similar outline. Some of the examples are the same, and the participant exercises are the same, too.  The workshops address the same diverse audience, comprising the range from quick-learning beginner who has at least a background in information science to someone already experienced in creating taxonomies but within a limited context and seeks to broaden those skills to more applications. In both kinds of workshops, the audience is also diverse in its professional backgrounds: librarians, corporate content managers and knowledge managers, indexers, web usability professionals and information architects; from industry, academia, nonprofits, and independent professionals. With such a wide diversity of backgrounds, the online workshop seems to resonate a little better with participants, none of whom then feels like a minority in a classroom of other types.

There is an organizational difference, whereby the outline of the onsite PowerPoint-based workshop has 10 topics, and online workshop comprises 5 weekly lessons: (1) an introduction of examples and applications, (2) software for creating taxonomies, (3) hierarchical and associative relationships, (4) preferred term wording and nonpreferred terms, and (5) miscellaneous topics of project processes, governance, folksonomies, and taxonomy jobs. Two onsite workshop topics may be covered in one weekly online lesson, although the onsite workshop does have the additional topics of the sources for terms and the comparison hierarchical taxonomies with alphabetical indexes (when presented as a pre-conference workshop for the American Society for Indexing). The order of topics is also different. The online workshop introduces software earlier on, so students have the option of using trial software to apply principles learned in later lessons.

The use of software is a significant difference in both workshops. In the onsite workshop, I give demos of Synaptica and Data Harmony Thesaurus Master, both web-based, and the PC software MultiTes. In the online workshop, participants access the demo software themselves, with the additional option to download the trial Mac software of Cognatrix (which I don’t demonstrate in my onsite workshop, since I don’t use a Mac.) Obviously, you can learn more when you try out the software yourself. Trial versions of MultiTes and Cognatrix are available to the public, but trials to Synaptica and Data Harmony are not and are made available by special arrangement for students of the workshop.

Q&A is more dynamic and engaging in the classroom setting. Although the online workshop has discussion forums, there is no simultaneous chat. Although the technology is there, the problem is that for a continuing education workshop this is in addition to everyone’s full time job and personal life. Spread out over different time zones too, it would be too difficult to get an agreeable time of day to chat. In the classroom it’s easier and less inhibiting to raise a question or make a comment. Online, it’s in writing, permanent for the duration of the course, and your name is attached to it. Thus, the online discussion of the workshop has usually been less than optimal.

Then there are the obvious differences.  Some people learn better by listening to a speaker, and some people learn better by reading texts on their own. Convenience of location and timing will also make a difference. The onsite workshop is usually offered only once a year (although a customized corporate onsite version is an option), whereas the online workshop is offered every other month and is accessible by Internet globally. However, the latter tends to fill up 2-3 months in advance, and the onsite workshop usually has room for same-day registrations (at a higher cost).

• Taxonomy & Thesaurus Construction, pre-conference workshop, April 19, San Diego, CA
• Taxonomies &  Controlled Vocabularies 5-lesson online workshop