Smart systems, past and future
Among the articles I should have read in 2012 but only got around to this past week, we have Mark Boulton’s excellent and perceptive Adaptive Content Management.
This turned out to be another one of those times when I read an article directed towards content strategists, and I think to myself that it’s something a lot of librarians should consider as well. I’m not the only post-librarian reading content strategy, am I? It helps that I never really got into reading library conference proceedings.
Mark writes about the challenges to creating good, lasting content for the web, and in particular takes a moment to consider how tedious it can be for writers to suddenly be responsible for creating their own metadata while crafting an original piece. The possibilities for required fields are nearly endless: “some meta data, pick some categories, a 140 character standfirst, and standfirst for the mobile display, upload some images…”
It’s a pain, and it’s disruptive to the process that authors are accustomed to. Some of today’s best writers won’t necessarily know what makes good metadata — or, perhaps just as likely, will disagree with the next featured author on what a tag like “mobile development” is supposed to mean.
But good metadata is what will make this content truly adaptive for web consumption, and this is why it’s such an important consideration for content management systems.
Mark suggests that the key to forging this path in content management systems is to “focus a little more on workflow and a little less on features” as a development team. He suggests forming working groups, certainly a natural place to start with a project as widely-scoped as a CMS.
I’m happy to see his obvious respect for the work that editorial teams do, and I sense that there’s a new kind of role emerging in the midst of this talk about good content practice, which is that of a new kind of editor.
This might be the same editor who works directly with authors on article development, but I could see an individual’s specialty being the metadata editing that happens after the full-length article is complete. This would be the person who is a skilled enough writer to pull together a pithy summary for Twitter, and who also has a strong sense of the tags that should be included, not to mention a knack for sorting articles into a neat, understandable series of categories.
Mark underscores the need to “Create tools that allow for curation.” This is cataloguing, something any library school graduate should have a grasp of. This is information science, alive and well. And more importantly, this is the kind of skill that promises to improve not only our content but our interactions with it.
The beauty of modern content management systems, by Mark’s account, is that they provide a “smart system” for “dumb content.” This means you aren’t burdening long-form authors with questions about search terms — you’re providing them with a system (which might involve other human team members, I’d add) that gets that information in a smarter way.
Libraries are perhaps the original “smart systems.” A book needs to do nothing but be a book. We do expect certain things of books — a title, for instance — but there is nothing about a physical book (I’m setting aside the power of book metadata for the moment) that inherently tells you that it does or does not belong in the pile of sources you should refer to for a research paper. This is something that the smart system of the library helps you with.
And that system usually includes a real, live librarian.
So where I see an opportunity for a new kind of editor in the world of digital content management, I’m seeing it also as a new type of curation. The Internet is already thought of as a wild sort of modern library. Why not staff it more thoughtfully?
