Taxonomy

A City’s Public Health Agency Marketing Department: Taxonomy Development

A City’s health agency’s Publications department needed help developing a Corporate Taxonomy.

THE PROBLEM

At the time, nearly 10 offices created from 5-100 media campaigns annually.  Occasionally, an unexpected health emergency would require a one-time use campaign created by a different office on a quick turn-around.

However, because the Department lacked a central repository and a Publications Library, staff remained unaware of many past campaigns. Often they had to re-create files that were lost. More importantly, it was difficult to verify the approved final versions. Assets from campaigns, in 12 different languages, were deeply-nested in sub-directories based on Office, Project Owner, tagline, folder name, or “Project Owner.”

THE SOLUTION

An Archivist worked with staff to identify files, directory locations and names, campaign and titles. While this was helpful, it did not solve the problem of a content-based library.

So a small team conducted a content audit and developed a Topic-Subject matrix. This matrix provided staff with a visualization to connect health marketing materials to specific campaigns by health subjects and topics. This helps improve intellectual control.  As a consequence, users benefit from centralized data and a dedicated system for federated search.

RESULTS

A controlled vocabulary and the Topic-Subject matrix helped improve communication. It also built an understanding on methods to differentiate and relate campaigns and their taglines and language for the professional epidemiologists, Office Directors and the Health Marketing staff.

Then the team trained employees and shared tips on executing advanced searches based on campaigns types, format and content. With the addition of the matrix, users can search or browse and make connections based on Subject (Zika Virus) or Topic (Infectious Diseases) as well as other criteria.

To learn more about the clients with whom we have worked, please see our Clients Page.
Visit the agency’s Publications site.