Knowledge

Earley & Associates offers access to articles and research reports that will help you learn basic concepts, identify best practices, understand requirements and be more successful in your content management, taxonomy, or search projects.

You can download free articles to get your feet wet as well as paid reports that will let you delve more deeply into topics.

Indexing & Taxonomies: Finding the Best Way to Organize Online Content

How should we categorize content for electronic management, storage, findability, and delivery? In the popular vernacular of our information architecture, we often talk about indexing content on one hand and then developing a taxonomy of terms on the other. At first glance, the differences between these two activities seem academic -- more of interest to research librarians and knowledge management gurus than to front-line business analysts and systems designers. After all, both indexing and taxonomies involve the use of language. We're simply developing sets of words and phrases, and then associating them with paragraphs, pages, drawings, documents, photographs, and other types of content objects.

SIX Metrics(TM) Framework - Measuring, Benchmarking & Improving Search Experience

Measuring the right aspects of search performance requires a holistic view of the content, processes, applications and usage patterns that collectively makeup search integration and experience (“SIX”).

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Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work?

As social tagging grows increasingly popular on the Web, organizations are curious to see how this trendy Web 2.0 approach can benefit the business world. Social tagging allows users to employ their own language to organize and retrieve content, and encourages social collaboration between peers by making those tags visible to others. Organizations are thus looking to social tagging as a potential solution for increased findability on intranets, news/blog monitoring and collaboration in workgroups.

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Tangled Up in Taxonomies

Far from being dead, taxonomies are more important than ever. In this article, Seth discusses the renewed importance of taxonomies from a number of perspectives, including the work of leveraging user research for improved experience, various taxonomy structures and their impact on content findability and reuse, and gaining buy-in from diverse groups of stakeholders.

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Is Web 2.0 Really New?

I recently sat in on a very exciting presentation about how Web 2.0 will flatten organizations and unleash knowledge and creativity locked up in employees stifled by rigid hierarchies… Oh wait a minute, wasn’t that the same talk I heard about knowledge management and collaboration back in 1998? So, what is different? What is the same? Are there lessons that can be leveraged from prior experiences with these concepts?

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Designing for Faceted Search

Now that faceted search interfaces are so prevalent, patterns are emerging that establish good design. If you are considering embarking on a faceted search implementation, here are five important points to consider.

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Conquering Chaos via Smart Content Management — Interview with Seth Earley

Managing content — whether documents, transactional data or digital assets — is about providing content in context. Users can't find what they need for many reasons: (1) information and systems evolve and tend toward a disordered state; (2) in most organizations governance processes around asset management, search, taxonomy and metadata are immature; (3) content is not "selectively managed. In this interview we discuss a number of issues around content management, taxonomy, tagging, metadata and search, and provide some ideas on how to tackle the chaos to create business value. Access full article...

Building the Business Case for Enterprise Search

A successful approach to search needs to factor in integration of content tagging, best bets, faceted search, investment in federated search, and so on. You can have the basic infrastructure, but to get real value, additional investments need to be made in operations and technology. It is the application of search infrastructure to business problems that requires the same rigor that any application requires.

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Wordmap Makes Taxonomy Creation Simple

Building and maintaining a taxonomy is not a walk in the park. Taxonomies are often complex structures involving hundreds to thousands of terms, synonyms, multi-language translations, non-hierarchical relationships, and more. The need for maintenance is ongoing: new terms need to be added, new relationships created, modifications to existing terms made. Without a specialized tool to manage all of these terms and relationships, the task of keeping your taxonomy useful and up-to-date is a challenge.

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Text Mining: Search's Silver Lining

What types of text mining technology can an enterprise use today without the time and expense of customized solutions? There are a surprising number of options. The biggest challenge is deciding on a particular vendor for a specific problem.

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Recent Articles


Developing a Content Maintenance and Governance Strategy This article, by Seth Earley, was published in the December 2010/January 2011 issue of ASIS&T Bulletin. Governance is not a simple process of writing up some plans and policies. Operationalizing governance requires the correct structures and working agendas. The Missing Piece of Content Management Information and content governance is frequently a missing piece of a content management plan. Think of building the new content management system (CMS) as building a new house. You design the layout of the house and requirements based on the needs of your family. Then you move into the house. In preparation for the move, you put all of your possessions in boxes and mark those boxes to indicate where they will be going in the new home. If you are moving into a larger home, you’ll likely take items that were in a single room and put them into multiple rooms.
ECM Projects Best Practices - Managing Vendor Selection This article originally appeared on DocumentMedia.com as "Pulling a McGiver" Parts 1 & 2 Faced with increasingly complex document and information management needs, many organizations are exploring so called ECM suites – Enterprise Content Management. The idea of ECM is simple – have one place where people can collaborate, solve problems, access reference materials, manage works in progress, develop learning curriculum, manage web site content, organize records, manage email, and engage in numerous other on line knowledge and information management tasks and processes. However appealing the concept of ECM seems to organizations, selection and implementation of ECM is complex and fraught with challenges. In this article, we’ll talk about the challenge of ECM, consider how to go about selecting tools and avoiding the pitfalls of the software purchase process and ways to gather and prioritize requirements.
Information Management Best Practices - Sample Chapter From the Introduction of Information Management Best Practices: "Just as business is practiced within a more specific context, information management is also practiced in context. Thus, we believe that the best wayto illustrate the concepts and practices of information management is within the context of one or more sub disciplines. So, this best practices book tries to show global principles of information management in the context of projects in one or more of the sub disciplines.

Developing a Content Maintenance and Governance Strategy

This article, by Seth Earley, was published in the December 2010/January 2011 issue of ASIS&T Bulletin.

Governance is not a simple process of writing up some plans and policies.

Operationalizing governance requires the correct structures and working agendas.

The Missing Piece of Content Management

Information and content governance is frequently a missing piece of a content management plan. Think of building the new content management system (CMS) as building a new house. You design the layout of the house and requirements based on the needs of your family. Then you move into the house. In preparation for the move, you put all of your possessions in boxes and mark those boxes to indicate where they will be going in the new home. If you are moving into a larger home, you’ll likely take items that were in a single room and put them into multiple rooms.

ECM Projects Best Practices - Managing Vendor Selection

This article originally appeared on DocumentMedia.com as "Pulling a McGiver" Parts 1 & 2

Faced with increasingly complex document and information management needs, many organizations are exploring so called ECM suites – Enterprise Content Management.

The idea of ECM is simple – have one place where people can collaborate, solve problems, access reference materials, manage works in progress, develop learning curriculum, manage web site content, organize records, manage email, and engage in numerous other on line knowledge and information management tasks and processes.

However appealing the concept of ECM seems to organizations, selection and implementation of ECM is complex and fraught with challenges. In this article, we’ll talk about the challenge of ECM, consider how to go about selecting tools and avoiding the pitfalls of the software purchase process and ways to gather and prioritize requirements.

Information Management Best Practices - Sample Chapter

From the Introduction of Information Management Best Practices:

"Just as business is practiced within a more specific context, information management is also practiced in context. Thus, we believe that the best wayto illustrate the concepts and practices of information management is within the context of one or more sub disciplines. So, this best practices book tries to show global principles of information management in the context of projects in one or more of the sub disciplines.