For the operational side of Web governance, the following three models are compared side by side in chart format. Some of the details are generalizations, but nonetheless help illustrate the differences between fully Centralized, Decentralized and Federated (Distributed) models for larger organizations.

Download: Comparison Chart of Web Governance Models

An ocean is never the same body of water because it’s always moving changing, evaporating and being replenished by new rainwater and runoff. Likewise, Internet content is an ocean of information that with content that is evaporating almost as quickly as new content flows into it.

We’ve heard of the deep Web and the invisible Web, private or subscriber-based databases that are not accessible to indexing by public search engines (intentionally or unintentionally), but what about millions of links that are broken when content types or entire Web sites are removed from production? Or domain names that expire?

While we might not miss “Kyle’s Frat Party” site, what about information of value to journalists, researchers and academics? For online journal publishers and academic researchers who cite Internet content in the form of URLs, this is an especially troublesome issue. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

…a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years.

ArchiveIt 2.0

One solution offered recently in a July 26, 2006 news release from The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the Web and other digital archives, is the Archive-It 2.0 service, which allows the permanent capture of Web-based information for reference and archival purposes. Existing partners in this effort include the featured collections of the University of Toronto, Indiana University and North Carolina State Archives.

Archive-It 2.0 enables digital archivists, library and museum professionals to create more tailored, relevant and search-friendly collections of up to 10 million URLs based on regular Web crawls across selected websites. Through test crawls, subscribers may see what kind of web material would populate a certain collection before actually archiving them permanently. An optional paid feature within Archive-It 2.0, Archive-It Pro, allows subscribers to not only set caps on how many web documents are collected from a website over time, but also block the collection of materials from specific websites altogether. The digital collections, as a result, are focused and more easily managed, because irrelevant materials do not find their way into an institution’s archives.

Another issue is Web 2.0 sites, Ajax, Flash, and the increasing number of sites publishing information dynamically. Unlike static pages that can be archived as a hard document, dynamic pages feature content on demand that changes based on what information is requested from a database. Most blog sites offer Permalinks so search engines can index a permanent (or semi-permanent) record of journal entries, but as the Goddard Library Web Project discovered in a D-Lib Magazine article published in Nov 2004, the Web is becoming increasingly inaccessible for archival purposes:

We encountered several problems when performing the crawl on the increasingly complex scientific web sites. The most common problem resulted from the increasingly dynamic nature of those web sites. This includes content that is controlled by Javascript and Flash technologies, and dynamic content driven from database queries or content management systems. The crawling tool is unable to crawl a web page containing a search form that queries a database.

ISO Standards for publications

While librarians and Internet archivists try to address the issue of vanishing or inaccessible Internet content, Web site owners and content developers can play a part in helping libraries and archives document and preserve the Web. On Canada’s national Library and Archives site, there’s an excellent paper on Electronic Publishing published in 2001. While this was intended for Canadian publishers, the principles can be broadly applied to any electronic publishers on the Web. This matrix explains the scope of what the document means by electronic publishers.

Serial publications

If you publish an online journal, ezine or other serial publication online, applying for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is a way to assign “a unique code for identifying serial publications, such as periodicals, newspapers, annuals, journals and monographic series” (Canada’s ISSN) and “magazines, newspapers, annuals (such as reports, yearbooks, and directories), journals, memoirs, proceedings, transactions of societies, and monographic series” (the United States ISSN). For serials distributed on the Internet and World Wide Web, the ISSN should appear on the first screen of the item.

While publishers are not legally obliged to use an ISSN, the U.S. site lists the benefits of applying for an ISSN:

The ISSN should be as basic a part of a serial as the title. The advantages of using it are abundant and the more the number is used the more benefits will accrue.

• ISSN provides a useful and economical method of communication between publishers and suppliers, making trade distribution systems faster and more efficient.

• The ISSN results in accurate citing of serials by scholars, researchers, abstracters, and librarians.

• As a standard numeric identification code, the ISSN is eminently suitable for computer use in fulfilling the need for file update and linkage, retrieval, and transmittal of data.

• ISSN is used in libraries for identifying titles, ordering and checking in, and claiming serials.
  ISSN simplifies interlibrary loan systems and union catalog reporting and listing.

• The U.S. Postal Service uses the ISSN to regulate certain publications mailed at second-class and controlled circulation rates.

• The ISSN is an integral component of the journal article citation used to monitor payments to the Copyright Clearance Center Inc.

• All ISSN registrations are maintained in an international data base and are made available in the ISDS Register, a microfiche publication which is scheduled to cease in the near future, or in “ISSN Compact,” a CD-ROM. These products are described in a document maintained by the ISSN International Centre: ISSN products

Individual publications

For individual publications, publishers should apply for an ISBN number. International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) are 10-digit standard numbers for the unique identification of each edition of a book or other monographic publication (e.g. pamphlets, educational kits, etc.), as per this information on the Canadian ISBN site:

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a system of numerical identification for books, pamphlets, educational kits, microforms, CD-ROM and other digital and electronic publications. Assigning a unique number to each published title, provides that title with its own, unduplicated, internationally recognized identifier.

As content publishers, our sites become part of the ocean of content online. We have a moral obligation to our current and future users to ensure the content we create becomes part of the Internet’s official historical record, good and bad, of humankind.

Get archived! 7 Ways to Keep Your Content from Vanishing

Most Web publishers, including me, are guilty of breaking links or removing content and having readers email you to ask “What happened to that (article/news item/link/download) on your site?”, but here are some steps you can take to help keep your content online and accessible (assuming you want it to be so!)

1. Check your links! This is a no-brainer, but with all the content management, link verification software and other tools available to Web publishers, it’s still a stinky issue. You or your Web development staff should establish link-naming conventions (e.g. Wikipedia’s) to govern the rules of how links are named, which can be followed consistently whether they are being named manually or dynamically.

2. Archive your links. If you really need to remove a link that is still valid, but isn’t relevant/essential to your site anymore, consider creating a Link Archive page where you can move the links so they can still be indexed by search engines and found by your users. Otherwise, create a redirect for old links so they point to a message indicating they are no longer available, or to new pages/content.

3. Archive your old site(s). Redesigning your site? Replacing it with a new version that has new content. Consider leaving the old site on your server in a Historical Site Archive area. If you don’t want search engines to index it and return pages of outdated results to your users, try using a robots.txt file that will exclude the historical pages from spidering.

4. Let the Internet Archive do the work. Read How can I get my site included in the Archive on the Internet Archive’s site. It’s a blast from the past to see older versions of sites going back to the mid-90s on the Internet Archive, and users can link to these pages, too.

5. Let search engines archive your pages. Find out how to ensure that your site is search engine optimized and that pages are not being published in a way that will cause search engine spiders to exclude them from indexing. Search Engine Watch is an excellent resource for SEO, SearchTools.com has some useful information on indexing robots and spiders, and the all-important Google provides guidelines for Webmasters on how to make your site Google-friendly.

6. Open up your content. Mirroring your content on other sites is another strategy for keeping your content alive and accessible. By licencing your content through a Creative Commons licence and/or offering it for republication or repurposing on the Internet, you can help ensure that your content stays alive and accessible. For more information, visit the Open Content Alliance, Connexions, or the University of British Columbia’s innovative Public Knowledge Project.

7. Use Universal Design principles. Last but not least, using Universal Design principles to ensure accessibility to the broadest range of users. It’s not only good from a usability perspective, but also from an archiving perspective.

Garth A. Buchholz, BA, CUA, is a certified Internet business strategist, usability analyst, researcher and publisher at DigitalPractices.

   What does “Contentology” mean?

In this Manifesto, Contentology is a coined word that, in its strictest etymology, could mean “the science of content” or “the study of content”. The word “Contentology” is supposed to make people stop and think for a moment, and if it sounds absurd, then we have to ask ourselves why it sounds absurd.

Most people presume that the word content means ‘something that is within something else.’ Yet this popular definition creates a tautology: “Content is content that’s inside something that seems to be content.”

Before the Internet became a tool for the masses, “content” or “contents” were simply vague terms for printed copy in a book or a magazine, or the food products inside a can of soup. The popular meaning usually referred to something that was being packaged for consumers, or something that was simply being stored or moved within containers.

Visit the Contentology site

Dlownload Contentology Manifesto

In 2004, author Lawrence Lessig coined the term “email bankruptcy.” After he spent 80 hours in one week sorting through email that had been in his inbox since January 2002, he concluded that “without extraordinary effort” he would never be able to catch up. So he sent out an automated message to everyone who wrote him, then deleted all their emails.

Many office workers, and most senior managers and executives, dread email. Just a few years ago, in the late ‘90s, business leaders used to freely give out their email addresses to anyone who asked because it allowed them to reduce phone calls or keep their numbers private. Now email overload has become the biggest wave of the digital tsunami.

Are unmanageable email volumes really the issue, though? A 2005 Intranetjournal.com article cites several behavioral and time-management issues causing information overload at work. “External causes” such as constant interruptions by colleagues (either in person, by phone, or email) certainly contributed to employees’ info stress, but there were also other “internal causes” for personal unproductivity and information overload, such as:

• An obsessive need to be “plugged in”, such as constantly checking email or voicemail;
• Poor attention span and lack of focus;
• Rampant multitasking and the inability to prioritize tasks.

Email is not the only digital wave overwhelming workers. Ironically, Blackberrys (affectionately called “crackberries” by those who have become addicted to them), cellphones, (both voice and text messaging) Facebook sites, blogs and other electronic communications help keep us connected at all times while subversively disconnecting us as well.

The Consumer Research Center of the Conference Board recently released the results of a survey of 1,800 affluent consumers in seven countries. The report found that “the largest share of luxury consumers (44%) and the largest share of consumers in each country most strongly agree that ‘luxury is having enough time to do whatever you want and being able to afford it.’ So, for luxury consumers worldwide, time is the ultimate luxury.”

One of the leading authorities on conquering information overload is David Allen, whose 2001 book, “Getting Things Done,” is a guide to “the art of stress-free productivity.” Allen writes about the problem of “open loops”: uncompleted tasks, unresolved issues and unanswered emails. His solution is to simplify by channelling all the tasks in our lives into a single “in box.”

Most productivity or time-management experts have two basic strategies for handling large volumes of incoming mail: 1) prioritize and organize emails by moving them into sub-folders or by using inbox rules, or 2) simply delete or ignore any emails that don’t require a response.

Here’s an example of organizing emails by priority. You can either use inbox rules to move emails from specific people or with specific subject lines to sub-folders. Or if you want to manually sort your email, you can create sub-folders as in the example below, or use coded labels, e.g. UR (Urgent – response required), IR (Important – response required), FR (Follow-up required); PR (phone response only), and NR (no response required – file or delete). This can help you triage your inbox so you respond the most important messages first.

The problem with inbox rules is they don’t always work as intended, and sometimes they can actually cause us to miss important messages unintentionally. And the problem with manually sorting emails by priority is that this process takes time as well. You have to at least browse a message to sort it by priority, and in the time it takes to browse some of them, you could almost skip the priority sorting and simply reply.

If time is a luxury for you and your employees, here are a few information management strategies to help you save time and turn information overload into information overdrive.

1. EMAIL

If you’re a busy executive or senior manager, delegate your emails as much as possible. Ask your Executive Assistant to read your email, respond to easy requests, and then send more urgent or time-sensitive emails to your attention. You could even request a second company email address that is private – available only to a small, select group.

If you don’t have an assistant, and you can’t control what email gets sent to you, remember that answering email is an administrative task like managing your budget or attending meetings. Find a quiet time of day when other staff are not around (e.g. 30 minutes before the office opens or 30 minutes before most people get back from lunch), then dedicate that time to checking voicemail and sorting/responding to emails.

It’s important not to lose productive time by getting the “email twitch”: feeling the urge to check your inbox every minute or every time you hear an email notification “ping.” Blackberrys are a wonderful to access your email but should be turned off when you’re at a meeting or working on something. Same thing applies to your personal Webmail accounts, e.g. Gmail or Hotmail. Some organizations allow employees to check their personal Webmail accounts from the office, but if you’re already feeling overloaded by your email inbox at work, don’t waste your time checking your personal emails during work hours.

Another email management strategy is to undertake some “human engineering” strategies to change the way people send emails to you. You can also use your inbox rules not only to move mail into different folders, but also to create an automated message that is sent to everyone who sends you an email message. For example: “Thank you for contacting me by email. I receive a large number of communications by email each day, so I can only respond to emails by priority. If your message is of an urgent nature, please call me at XXX-XXXX or drop by my office. If I do not respond to your email immediately, please be assured that I will follow-up on it as soon as possible.”

Of course, every time someone emails you, they will receive an automated message, and these will fill up the inboxes of chronic emailers – which should reinforce why you are trying to manage your own email volumes in a productive way!

2. CELLPHONES/BLACKBERRYS

Two things about voice communications devices create information management problems:

1. We have too many devices – we have a home landline phone, a personal cell, an office landline, a cellphone/Blackberry and sometimes even more.
2. We have too many voicemails, usually one for each of the devices mentioned above.

Make it a personal policy NOT to check your personal voicemail during the workday. At work, limit who has your business cell number to your boss, your assistant, and a few colleagues. If you have a landline, too, forward your landline to the cellphone when you’re out of the office, or vice versa when you’re in the office. Avoid having to login to several different voicemails by limiting the number of phones you use. But when you leave the office, leave your business cell and Blackberry at work if you can.

3. WEBSITES/FACEBOOK/MYSPACE/BLOGS

The World Wide Web is a great time-waster for employees and managers when they succumb to the temptation of browsing non-work-related sites during office hours. Well-intentioned Internet usage policies can help a bit, but instead of prohibiting such behavior, why not find ways to redirect your employees’ information explorations and exchanges into something productive? Channel your staff’s desire to express themselves by allowing them to create their own internal “homepages” profiling who they are and what they do, participate in collaborative workspaces (e.g. Sharepoint), or post to company blogs that are semi-moderated. New generations in the workforce will thrive on this, and you may find that this activity pays off in better internal communications, collaboration and knowledge management.

Garth A. Buchholz is an author, educator and corporate Web strategist at DigitalPractices.

I have been developing unified content strategies for about 15 years and working with content management systems for about the same period of time. The unified content strategy came about as I realized that there was no clear strategy for creating multiple documents or learning materials for products and services for a company. They were often created by different individuals and inconsistent. Often I was asked to create multiple documents on a very tight budget and short timeframe. The only way to do this time and cost effectively was to develop a unified content strategy then develop the materials to support the strategy.

My experience with content management began when clients had more and more information to manage (ranging from 10,000 pages to more than 100,000 pages) and as I began to develop materials in SGML. SGML databases enabled me to manage elements of content, not just documents. It was a perfect fit to use content management to support the unified content strategy.Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy came about as a result of our work with our clients. The book answers the questions that each client asked as they started to work with us. Now when we start to work with a new client the client already understands the basic concepts and process so we can “hit the ground running”. The Rockley Group works on each project as a team, drawing on different skill sets at different times to most effectively address the client’s requirements. It was a logical step to draw on two of our senior consultants to develop the content of the book. The book also answers the many questions we get from participants in our conference presentations, webinars and workshops. The book provides a solid foundation for anyone hoping to improve the way they create, manage, and deliver content.  Many companies tend to leave the content strategy to the IT developers, and many IT developers tend to shy away from serious discussions about content.

In your opinion, how can companies ensure that a unified content strategy will be developed?

A business case for a unified content strategy should always be presented from the business perspective. That is, issues surrounding content are not merely technology problems. Rather, they are complex business challenges that affect a company’s bottom line, and should be addressed as such. The IT and the business side should be partners in a unified content project, with both sides responsible and accountable for process and quality improvements, reduced costs and ultimately, greater customer satisfaction.

In your book, you talk about separating form and content. It’s one thing doing that for structured content, but is there any risk in doing that with unstructured content?

The goal of a unified content strategy is to define structure for previously unstructured content. So, once you’ve analyzed and modeled your materials, the content is no longer unstructured. With content that is left unstructured, for example documents that are not broken down further than a title, subheadings and document body, you can still separate the form from the content.

The content is in fact structured, just to a very high level of granularity. If your authors create content using stylesheets or templates, the style tags can still be “mapped” to different formats for different media. However, if authors do not use styles or adhere to a template, you cannot easily separate format from content.

As you’ve written, creating metadata can be difficult and time-consuming. How can organizations learn to consistently create metadata across the enterprise for retrieval, tracking and assembling for re-use? Should there be a set of Internet standards for creating controlled vocabularies, etc?

Internet standards for creating controlled vocabularies would be helpful, but individual organizations don’t need to wait for these types of standards to go ahead and create their own guidelines and controlled vocabularies internally. Many sectors and industries already have terminology standards that can be adapted and used to create metadata guidelines.

To be successful, a unified content strategy should be considered as an enterprise-level endeavor right from the start, even if not all areas in an organization are participating right away. Participating departments should define their own metadata with the entire organization in mind. They should solicit information from, and share it with, other departments to make sure that the metadata can be universally applied when the time comes.

Can you tell us about some of the content-related issues and challenges you’ve seen many organizations face, either on the development or the management side of things?

The most common content-related issue, and often the indicator that drives organizations to seek help in defining a unified content strategy, is the inability of either internal users of the content, or customers, to find the information they need. This manifests in many ways, including redundant content creation, increased costs due to inefficient content creation processes, and lost revenue due to customer dissatisfaction or content inconsistencies.

Organizations sometimes have a hard time getting buy-in from management, which is why they need to present a business case that demonstrates how these issues are affecting the company’s bottom line. IT and business need to work together to build a strong business case for a unified content strategy, and to select and implement the proper tools to support the solution. Too often, organizations have already committed to a particular tool or technology, without properly analyzing content-related business requirements ahead of time. It’s like going out and having a suit made without first taking your measurements.

In the near future, what kind of technology solutions do you see as having a powerful impact on content management in large organizations?

The move to adopt XML by many vendors has been the most significant breakthrough to date affecting content management, and will continue to benefit the content management industry moving forward, as new ways to apply its versatility to content-related issues are developed. In future, better native integration between authoring tools, content management systems and delivery systems are likely to emerge, as content management vendors gain a greater understanding of the issues and requirements of authors and publishers. Industry-specific content management solutions for areas such as health sciences and other regulated industries are being developed now.

Another area that vendors are beginning to address is the translation of content, and the integration of authoring, translation memory, content management and globalization management tools.

How do you see the Internet changing? Do you think it’s becoming a more proprietary and less open-source environment in terms of information, culture, commerce?

The Internet has been moving towards more proprietary and less open-source for years as vendors have created tools to assist people in creating and managing content on the web. As these tools have gained acceptance their proprietary focus has been overlaid on the Internet. I don’t see this changing though there will always be a role for open-source.

The Internet moved very rapidly from a tool for the academic and scientific community to the primary marketing and sales vehicle for many companies. This has dramatically changed the orientation of the Internet. However, it has continued to grow and support knowledge in more effective ways than traditional libraries and this will continue. Education, learning, knowledge, and knowledge sharing have changed for the good and it can only continue to grow.

Finally, do you have any other interesting books in progress or other projects you’d like to tell us about?

The Rockley Group is currently focusing on content/information modeling and metadata design for content reuse and management. Little or no literature exists on this topic and it is critical to the effective design of a unified content strategy. We are developing methodologies, techniques, and strategies in this area to optimize reuse, content structure and optimize the support for the models in authoring, content management, and delivery tools. We have recently developed workshops for our clients and the public on this topic. At some point in the future this may become a book.