People responsible for planning, creating, and managing information and information systems in the world today identify with various academic disciplines and business and industrial fields. As Craig Baehr explains, this can make it difficult to find or to develop and sustain a body of knowledge that represents the “interdisciplinary nature” of the technical communication field (Baehr, 2013, p. 294). In his article, Baehr describes his experience working with a variety of other experts to develop and produce a “large-scale knowledge base” for those who identify with the “technical communication” field and to ensure that knowledge base embodies a “systematic approach” to formulating an “integrated or hybrid” “content strategy” that considers the “complex set of factors” involved in such long-term projects, factors such as the “human user,” “content assets,” “technology,” and “sustainable practices” (Baehr, 2013, pp. 293, 295, 305).
Baehr defines a “body of knowledge” as representing the “breadth and depth of knowledge in the field with overarching connections to other disciplines and industry-wide practices” (Baehr, 2013, p. 294). As the author discusses, the digital age presents a unique set of challenges for those collecting and presenting knowledge that will attract and help scholars and practitioners. One important consideration Baehr discusses is the “two dominant, perhaps philosophical, approaches that characterize how tacit knowledge evolves into a more concrete product,” an information and information systems product such as a website with an extensive content database and perhaps some embedded web applications. The two approaches Baehr describes are the “folksonomy” or “user-driven approach” and the “taxonomy” or “content-driven approach” (Baehr, 2013, p. 294). These two approaches affect aspects of the knowledge base such as the “findability” of its content and whether users are allowed to “tag” content to create a kind of “bottom-up classification” in addition to the top-down taxonomy created by the site’s navigation categories (Baehr, 2013, p. 294). In regard to this particular project, Baehr explains how the development team used both a user survey and topics created through user-generated content to create “three-tiered Topic Lists” for the site’s home page. While some of the highest-level topics such as “consulting” and “research” were taken from the user survey, second-level topics such as “big data,” and third-level topics such as “application development” were taken from user-generated topics on discussions boards and from topics the development team gleaned from current technical communication research (Baehr, 2013, p. 304).
In this article, Baehr’s primary concern is with providing an overview of the issues involved in developing digital knowledge bases in general and of his experience in developing a digital knowledge base for the technical communication field in particular. As mentioned, he concludes using “an integrated or hybrid” approach involving various methods to develop and organize the information content based upon a “sustainable content strategy” (Baehr, 2013, p. 293).