Key Concept Archive

For more information about how our library science background (and our love of all things metadata) guides the way we catalog information, see the Techcomm and Arbortext Resources page.

Is Your DITA Output Ugly? You Can Fix That!

Yes you can have it all! Technical accuracy and marketing pizzazz. Learn how a modular approach to content creation, storage, and delivery, gives you a single source of truth for your content and how that source can meet all of your content delivery requirements whether they are technical, marketing, or…

Using Style Guides to Achieve Content Collaboration and Consistency

Style Guides: What Goes In Them and What Can They Cover? Style guides are serve an important role, establishing guidelines to improve communication, ensure consistency, and enforce best practices in composition, presentation, and language, and representing the specific needs of the business and it’s customers. Most organizations adopt one of…

Secrets of a gumshoe librarian: Tips for transforming your career and staying relevant

Is your career ready for a makeover? Have you been forced into making a change? Client and employer needs evolve, and we should too. But no one wakes up and just decides to upend their career, because change can be hard and sometimes scary. In this session, Marcy Phelps shares…

What should be in a Year-End Review?

The end of the year is a time for us all to look ourselves over critically in the mirror and review our performance:“In December, I want to look back at the year and answer two questions:1. how did we do? and2. what do we want to do better next year?”~…

Extend Your DITA Reuse with Keys

A crucial benefit of moving to a structured authoring environment is the ability to easily reuse content. Text entities, file entities and now with the DITA standard there is also keys and keyrefs. This DITA key method allows a user to create a placeholder for text, file paths or graphics….

Arbortext 201: Configuring Arbortext for MIL-STD Doctypes

Learn the basics for getting Arbortext and Windchill configured for the MIL-STD-38784 doctype. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-997-6505-6-3

Building a Style Guide from the Ground Up

How do you establish a style guide, and how do you keep it going? In this session, I’ll talk about my experience implementing and maintaining a corporate style guide. What started as a casual department guide for 25 tech writers is now a formal style guide for all content creators…

How to Identify DITA Topic Types (like a ninja)

When you’re new to DITA everything seems hard. Even choosing a topic type. New writers lean away from the specialized toward the generic. Teams get inconsistent structures for similar information across deliverables. In this session, Liz Fraley will show you one strategy for identifying topics—in legacy content and for new…