Category Archives: Knowledge Management

A Pain in the Metadata

Posted on by David

Seb points to an interesting presentation on metadata written by Stefano Mazzocchi.

The presentation dances around an issue we ran into like a brick wall: quality metadata is needed to provide quality search and retrieval on large collections of material, however, the amount of human effort needed to create the metadata is directly proportional to the size of the collection.

This does not scale well and has to be done in a distributed way unless you can afford a room of librarians on staff. The problem with distributed metadata creation is one of training. Expecting our usual web content contributors to be experts in applying our full thesaurus is not realistic. Hell, I’m not an expert in applying it either.

So what to do? I’m open to suggestions!

We are experimenting with targeting specific, high knowledge-value, subcollections for in-depth metadata tagging by a central expert. A ‘shallow’ representation of the full thesaurus would be used for indexing normal content on the web site by distributed content contributors.

The idea is that the high-value resources, typically used in academic research, allow for the most finely tuned searching while less valuable content is tagged in much less detail. All of it in combination should be supportable by existing staff resources.

I also want to explore allowing our users to rate the value of individual pages/items and see if that provides better rankings than we can do internally.

Staff Directories

Posted on by David

Column Two has posted a “list of what you might consider including in your staff directory.” A few extras we are considering for our staff directory, in addition to those on James’ list, include:

  • regular work hours
  • telecommuting days with contact info
  • teams you are a member of (we are a team-based staff)
  • teams you are interested in
  • self-selected subject areas of expertise (drawn from our thesaurus)
  • self-selected subject areas of interest (also drawn from our thesaurus)

Sharing Requires Trust

Posted on by David

Jim McGee’s comments on moving from need-to-know to shared awareness information policies within an organization. Here is a quote:

If, on the other hand, your focus is on the external mission, i.e. getting the job done for customers, the issue shifts to how best to let everyone have access to and know what is going on that might be relevant. In part this has to be founded on a deeper sense of trust in all the members of the organization. Trust both in their judgment to make good and appropriate use of information and knowledge and, more importantly, in their capacity to manage the torrent of bits on their own. No need to be paternalistic about it.

Exactly.

Rick Klau's Klog Pilot Report

Posted on by David

Rick Klau has written up a K-Log Pilot Recap.

Bottom line: we learned a lot about how we want to share information internally. Noone in the company had a bad experience with their weblog. Some gravitated to it, while others found themselves more as a “consumer” of information rather than a “producer”. This experience provoked a number of excellent conversations about what kind of information would be valuable inside the company. Sales people started thinking about what they did that might be useful for product management; development started thinking about what marketing was working on that might make them more effective.

Thanks for writing up your experience!