About Heather Hedden
Heather Hedden is a consultant, with a specialization in taxonomies, ontologies, metadata, and indexing.
Heather started her business Hedden Information Management in 2004, and has offered various services over the years: small website design and information architecture, back-of-the-book indexing, website A-Z index creation, web indexing training, taxonomy and controlled vocabulary design and creation, taxonomy evaluation and consulting, and taxonomy creation training. The focus of her business currently is taxonomy consulting and training.
Heather has alternated full-time independent consulting with employed experience, and is currently employed as a a senior consultant with the knowledge and information management consulting firm Enterprise Knowledge, LLC.
Past employment experience includes:
– Knowledge Engineer with Semantic Web Company, providing taxonomy and ontology modeling services for the customers of PoolParty Semantic Suite software, along with sales and marketing support.
– Senior Vocabulary Editor at Cengage Learning, developing discipline taxonomies and metadata for higher education educational products, and at Cengage’s Gale division, managing and updating the subject thesaurus and other controlled vocabularies for indexing content for library research databases.
– Senior Taxonomy Analyst at the consulting company Project Performance Corporation, providing custom taxonomy design and development services to clients in varied industries.
– Taxonomy Manager at First Wind Energy, creating taxonomies for document management and search in SharePoint.
– Information Taxonomist at the software developer Viziant Corporation, developing taxonomies integrated into a search tool.
Heather independently teaches an online course in taxonomy creation and previously taught it through the Continuing Education Program of Simmons University – School of Library and Information Science. She has given numerous conference workshops and presentations and published many articles on taxonomies, indexing, and other information management topics and has written two books: The Accidental Taxonomist, published by Information Today, Inc. in 2010 with the second edition in 2016, and third edition in 2022, and Indexing Specialties: Web Sites, published jointly by the American Society for Indexing and Information Today, Inc. in 2007. Heather also has a background in writing and editing, including reference book essays, abstracts, technical documentation, and magazine and newspaper articles.
Heather’s professional activities include the following:
- Editor and North American contact for the Basic Register of Thesauri, Ontologies, and Classifications (BARTOC.org), 2018 – present.
- Member of the board of the American Society for Indexing, 2015 – 2018.
- Working group member of the Content and Collection Management Topic Committee’s Bibliographic Roadmap Project of NISO (National Information Standards Organization), which published NISO TR-06-2017, Issues in Vocabulary Management, 2015-2017.
- Manager of the Digital Publications Indexing Special Interest Group of ASI, 2017.
- Chair of the Mentoring Committee (2010-2012) and chair of the Membership Committee (2016) of the Taxonomy Division of SLA.
- Founder and manager of the Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies Special Interest Group of ASI, 2007-2010.
- Vice president and then president of the New England Chapter of the American Society for Indexing (ASI), 2005-2006.
Current professional affiliations
Heather is profiled/interviewed in:
- The AI Digest March 1, 2024 (video recording)
- Another DAM Podcast February 23, 2023 (audio recording)
- The Informed Life podcast July 19, 2020 (audio recording)
- Journal of Digital Media Management March 19, 2012 (article)
- Cornell University Russian Program graduates web page
See also:
Contact Heather Hedden
98 East Riding Drive
Carlisle, MA 01741-1602
U.S.A.
Tel. 978-467-5195 (mobile)
E-mail
