Organizing for Service: The Librarian's Role

Rebecca Schneider Skills that Rebecca Schneider learned in library science school - taxonomy, ontology, and semantic modeling - have only become more valuable with the arrival of AI technologies like LLMs and the growing interest in knowledge graphs. Two things have stayed constant across her library and enterprise content strategy work: organizational rigor and the need to always focus on people and their needs. We talked about: her work as Co-Founder and Executive Director at AvenueCX, an enterprise content strategy consultancy her background as a "recovering librarian" and her focus on taxonomies, metadata, and structured content the importance of structured content in LLMs and other AI applications how she balances the capabilities of AI architectures and the needs of the humans that contribute to them the need to disambiguate the terms that describe the span of the semantic spectrum the crucial role of organization in her work and how you don't to have formally studied library science to do it the role of a service mentality in knowledge graph work how she measures the efficiency and other benefits of well-organized information how domain modeling and content modeling work together in her work her tech-agnostic approach to consulting the role of metadata strategy into her work how new AI tools permit easier content tagging and better governance the importance of "knowing your collection," not becoming a true subject matter expert but at least getting familiar with the content you are working with the need to clean up your content and data to build successful AI applications Rebecca's bio Rebecca is co-founder of AvenueCX, an enterprise content strategy consultancy. Her areas of expertise include content strategy, taxonomy development, and structured content. She has guided content strategy in a variety of industries: automotive, semiconductors, telecommunications, retail, and financial services. Connect with Rebecca online LinkedIn email: rschneider at avenuecx dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/ex8Z7aXmR0o Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 25. If you've ever visited the reference desk at your local library, you've seen the service mentality that librarians bring to their work. Rebecca Schneider brings that same sensibility to her content and knowledge graph consulting. Like all digital practitioners, her projects now include a lot more AI, but her work remains grounded in the fundamentals she learned studying library science: organizational rigor and a focus on people and their needs. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 25 of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show Rebecca Schneider. Rebecca is the co-founder and the executive director at AvenueCX, a consultancy in the Boston area. Welcome, Rebecca. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Rebecca: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me on your show. Hello, everyone. My name is Rebecca Schneider. I am a recovering librarian. I was a trained librarian, worked in a library with actual books, but for most of my career, I have been focusing on enterprise content strategy. Furthermore, I typically focus on taxonomies, metadata, structured content, and all of that wonderful world that we live in. Larry: Yeah, and we both come out of that content background and have sort of converged on the knowledge graph background together kind of over the same time period. And it's really interesting, like those skills that you mentioned, the library science skills of taxonomy, metadata, structured, and then the application of that in structured content in the content world, how, as you've got in more and more into knowledge graph stuff, how has that background, I guess...