hi, I'm Susan Doran. I started working with taxonomies, controlled vocabs, in 1989 when a Graduate Assistant at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, with the US Dept of Ed's ERIC Clearinghouse, tweaking and adding to the ERIC Thesaurus, and doing indexing/abstracting. Subsequently, in every position I've had (from running the info mgmt group at the US Government Accountability Office, to being a nonprofit director, running a consulting firm, and being a hands-on practitioner/information architect) I've created, built, worked with, overhauled, and maintained taxonomies. In 1993-1998 I launched an information services dept for a national nonprofit--my first order of business was setting up the systems for and then overseeing the creation of a massive [for that time] documents database, requiring scanning, OCR, and text analysis of 20 years of the organization's information assets (books, newsletters, white papers, all contents of the library, 10 file cabinets), as well as content of its key members. It was perhaps primitive compared to what's available, but I'm still proud of that effort--which added tremendous value to thousands of users--and plugged me in at the ground floor. At GAO, in the 2000s, my department was responsible for scanning, text analysis, and indexing all of GAO's documents, integrating GAO's taxonomy with the web information architecture, leveraging taxonomy throughout the agency---as well as fine-tuning the text analysis tool and writing rules, to--among other things---prepopulate content on GAO's the web site, and send out topical alerts to Congress. Many other examples, but more recently I've worked with taxonomies that are *associated *with text mining and analysis--and to say I'm fascinated would be an understatement; however, I haven't been able to get into the guts of it as much as I yearn to. In starting a new company, Living Archives, I have a high-level sense of how I would like to make use of programs like SAS, but need to learn more how that might be possible---and how people are using SAS now. From what I read, even in these intros, I can see I'll learn a lot. I don't know how much value I can add immediately, but look forward to being part of this community. Thanks, SAS and Heather!
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