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.

Structured Authoring for Beginners

Are you new to structured authoring and topic-based writing? Are you more comfortable with unstructured desktop publishing applications and apprehensive about moving to XML or some other structured authoring environment? This workshop is for you if you want to know…

Topic Based Writing: Future-Proofing Your Content?

This is what we'll cover: Topic-Based writing: the basics The nature of a topic Topic morphology: title, short description (optionally) and content The importance of conceptual consistency Topic-Based writing: content creation and management Standing alone versus story telling A theory…

How to find the best content management system (or any other tool)

b Post Summary In this article, I hope I can convince you to gather requirements before you buy. It's the only way to guarantee that you find the best content management system for you. Not for someone else. FOR YOU….

Publish High-Quality, Print-Ready DITA in less than a day

b Post Summary Everyone says, “Publishing DITA is Hard!” But the truth is you can publish DITA content for ePub and Print output with very little work. The promise that vendors (like us) have been giving for 20 years is…

Liz Fraley on Single Sourcing on the 10-Minute Tech Comm Podcast

Summary: Liz Fraley of single-sourcing.com talks about how companies can successfully make the shift to single sourcing on the 10 Minute Tech Comm podcast When you're first approaching single sourcing project and designing your information architecture, it can be daunting…

Key Referencing – The Key to Reuse

Topic based content enables organizations to piece content together to fit different customer needs. But often times this content can't be shared and reused to its full potential because it contains product names, specific values, screenshots, links, or other content…

Unhappy Customers are Just the Beginning: Potential Costs of Skimping on Documentation

A perennial question in the technical communication community is how to justify our work in financial terms that management will understand. One partial answer is to consider potential consequences of putting insufficient resources into technical documentation. What happens if the…

The Power of Single-Sourcing

Every day, technical communications professionals are faced with maintaining their current productivity in the face of increasing product complexity, increasing number of languages, increasing volume of documentation, increasing product overlap and shorter product life cycles. No matter how large or…