Creating order out of chaos with taxonomies: the increasing volume of electronic records and the frequency with which those records change require the development and implementation of taxonomies--a classification system of topics or subject categories--to maximize efficient retrieval of records for legal, business, and regulatory purposes.

• Author: Cisco, Susan L.
• Position: Instrumental taxonomies

According to an online article from LAW.COM, more than 90 percent of new business records are created electronically, and 40 percent of them are never converted to paper. This deluge of mostly unstructured digital data, documents, e-mail, and instant messages raises serious issues related to retention, storage, and accessibility. Meanwhile, regulators and stakeholders compel organizations to enhance transparency, demonstrate accountability, and implement controls.

The higher the level of public scrutiny by regulators and stakeholders, the greater the need organizations have for applying management controls. Some types of comprehensive record searches (e.g., divestitures, due diligence investigations, and electronic discovery in response to courts and regulators), are difficult to conduct without taxonomies. To maximize efficient and effective retrieval of records for legal, business, and regulatory purposes, organizations must develop and implement taxonomies and metadata to complement text searching, provide multiple access points to information, and incorporate retention requirements.

Methods for Organizing Information

Historically, classification systems were expressly developed to classify physical objects that existed in physical locations (see "A Little History" sidebar), but technological advancements in the twentieth century brought an explosion of information--both digital and physical--that forever changed notions of classifying an "information collection."

The information contained in physical and digital records changes frequently--daily, weekly, monthly--and sometimes without warning. Frequent updates, such as modification or deletion of items, are critical when time-sensitive information is involved, but updates can be very disconcerting to users who find themselves hunting for moving targets. A 2004 Delphi Group research report indicated that constantly changing information was the biggest impediment to relocating and retrieving information. Seventy-three percent of survey respondents reported they spend 10 to 20 percent of their work week searching for information.

Compounding the problem of frequently changing information is the increasing volume of hardcopy and digital records that organizations maintain for legal and business purposes. A 2000 Reuters study indicated that "Every day, approximately 20m [20 million] words of technical information are recorded." (As a testament to the volatility of information, the Reuters article is no longer available online.) While the largest library collection in the world, the Library of Congress, consists of nearly 128 million items, a large organization can easily maintain tens of millions of physical and digital records.

One tool that is instrumental for managing increasing records volume is a taxonomy: a structured, often hierarchical, classification system of topics or subject categories. Taxonomies speed up the process of retrieving records because end users can select from subject categories or topics, enabling them to narrow the search field and find relevant information rather than relying solely on the blank text search field and their ability to construct an effective query. Taxonomies also provide "serendipitous guidance," according to a 2003 The Information Management Journal article by Denise Bruno and Heather Richmond, because additional information can be inferred from seeing where a topic resides in the taxonomy's context.

End users who are not knowledgeable about a particular topic might begin a search process by navigating through the taxonomy. When an area of interest is discovered, a text search against only the records in this particular area of the taxonomy could be executed. Conversely, the user might start with a text search producing hundreds or thousands of records. Through the integration of a taxonomy, the results could be displayed as a customized set of folders that organize the content by related topics. According to the Delphi Group report, enterprise content management (ECM) products enable taxonomy integration, allowing users to search across repositories, present records from multiple repositories in response to user queries, and personalize these responses based on the requestor's relationship to the enterprise.

In most organizations, there is still no way to search for electronic records in multiple repositories except to search each repository separately. Despite compelling arguments for using taxonomies in records and information management, according to...