Heather Hedden is a consultant
and freelance taxonomist and owner of Hedden Information Management. She is also an instructor of taxonomy development
through the continuing education program of Simmons College Graduate School of
Library and Information Science and through independently offered online
training. In addition, she does freelance indexing of both books (closed
indexing) and database content (open indexing).
Previously,
Heather worked for eight years as a controlled vocabulary editor for
Information Access Company/Gale. Her work there included converting the
controlled vocabularies into ANSI/NISO standard thesauri, updating and adding
new taxonomy terms, communicating new terms and policies to indexers, mapping
taxonomies, and creating new user-interface taxonomies. Heather then worked as
the information taxonomist at an enterprise search software startup, Viziant
Corporation, where she was solely responsible for developing all taxonomies
used with machine-learning-based auto-categorization. She has also done
contract taxonomy work for Gale, Factiva, Dow Jones, Earley & Associates,
Bain & Company, and various yellow pages publishers, among other clients.
Heather is the
author of Indexing Specialties: Web Sites (2007) and of the chapter
'Controlled Vocabularies, Thesauri, and Taxonomies' in Index It Right!
Advice From the Experts (Vol. 2, 2010), both of which are published by
Information Today, Inc., on behalf of the American Society for Indexing (ASI).
She has also published numerous articles in journals such as EContent, Intranets,
Computers in Libraries, The Indexer, and Key Words (bulletin
of ASI). Heather has given presentations and workshops nationally and
internationally at conferences including Taxonomy Boot Camp, Enterprise Search
Summit, Gilbane Conference, Content Management Professionals, ASI, Indexing
Society of Canada, Society of Indexers (U.K.), and Netherlands Society of
Indexers. Her professional association memberships include Special
Libraries Association and its
Taxonomy Division, the Information Architecture Institute, and ASI. Heather has
served as president of the New England Chapter of ASI, manager of the Web
Indexing special interest group of ASI, and founder/manager of the Taxonomies
& Controlled Vocabularies special interest group of ASI.
Heather has a BA from Cornell University and an MA from Princeton University.
She lives in Carlisle, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.
