About Heather Hedden

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About Heather

Hedden Information Management

About Heather Hedden

Heather Hedden is an information management professional, with a specialization in taxonomies, indexing, and search. She currently works as a senior analyst providing taxonomy consulting services with Project Performance Corporation.

Before starting her own business, Hedden Information Management in 2004, Heather had over eight years’ experience in controlled vocabulary management and thesaurus development at Gale (Cengage Learning). Previously she worked as a periodical database indexer with Gale’s predecessor, Information Access Company. As senior vocabulary editor at Gale, she also developed taxonomies for web search interfaces. From January 2007 through July 2008 she worked full time as an information taxonomist for the enterprise search software developer Viziant Corporation, and from June through December 2010 she worked as the taxonomy manager at First Wind Energy, LLC.

Heather teaches online courses in taxonomies and in web site indexing, both independently and through the Continuing Education Program of Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She has given numerous presentations and published many articles on taxonomies, indexing, and other information management topics and has recently written two books: The Accidental Taxonomist, published by Information Today, Inc. and Indexing Specialties: Web Sites, published jointly by the American Society for Indexing and Information Today, Inc. Heather also has a background in writing and editing, including reference book essays, abstracts, technical documentation, and magazine and newspaper articles.

Heather served as vice president and then president of the New England Chapter of the American Society for Indexing in 2005 and 2006 respectively. In January 2005 she restarted the previously inactive Web Indexing Special Interest Group of the American Society for Indexing and served as its manager for two years. Currently she is the SIG's treasurer. In 2007 she founded the Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies Special Interest Group, which she chaired for three years. Heather is also chair of the Mentoring Committee of the Taxonomy Division of SLA.

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