Heather Hedden

Heather Hedden has over 15 years of taxonomy and indexing experience. She specializes in designing and building out hierarchical taxonomies, faceted taxonomies, and thesauri for commercial, enterprise, and research/publishing applications. She also has expertise in selecting and providing training in dedicated taxonomy/thesaurus management software, providing training and documentation for indexers using taxonomies, and consulting in information architecture navigational design. In addition to working for Earley & Associates, Heather’s taxonomy clients have included Bain & Company, Serials Solutions, WAND, Factiva, and Gale. Prior to consulting, Heather was senior vocabulary editor for the reference and periodical databases of Thomson Gale (now Cengage Learning) for many years. She also worked as the taxonomist for the enterprise search and discovery software vendor, Viziant Corporation. Finally, Heather is familiar with translation and localization issues having previously worked as a translations agency project coordinator.

Heather extends her professional expertise in teaching, speaking and writing. She teaches the popular online continuing education classes, “Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies” and “Creating Website Indexes,” through Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She also teaches full-day workshops in taxonomy and thesaurus construction through Simmons and at conferences. Heather has published numerous articles on information management, taxonomies, and indexing in trade and professional journals. She is author of Indexing Specialties: Web Sites (Information Today Inc., 2007), the chapter “Controlled Vocabularies, Thesauri, and Taxonomies” in Index It Right, Vol. 2 (Information Today Inc., 2010), and The Accidental Taxonomist (Information Today Inc., 2010).

Heather is the founder and manager of the Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies Special Interest Group of the American Society for Indexing and past president of the New England Chapter of the American Society for Indexing. Heather has a B.A. in Government from Cornell University and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.