About The Book
The Language of Content Strategy is the gateway to a language that describes the world of content strategy. Co-produced by Scott Abel and Rahel Anne Bailie, and with over fifty contributors, all known for their depth of knowledge, this collection of terms forms the core of an emerging profession and, as a result, helps shape the profession. The terminology spans a range of competencies within the broad area of content strategy.
There is a recognition that content strategy is about the care and delivery of content at all points in its lifecycle, from its planning and creation right through to its sunsetting, and all stages in between. This book also recognizes that content gets delivered in many markets, in many languages, and to many devices.
This book, and its companion website and terminology card deck, is an invitation to readers to join the conversation. This is an important step: the beginning of a common language. Using this book will not only help you shape your work, but also encourage you to contribute your own terminology and help expand the depth and breath of the profession.
The Language of Content Strategy is part of The Content Wrangler Series of Content Strategy books from XML Press.
Acknowledgements
This book has been a labor of love by a group of expert practitioners who gave of their time and knowledge to contribute to what we feel is a long-overdue endeavor: a lexicon for our profession.
Our thanks go first to the fifty-two contributors who provided the definitions and essays in this book. They all delivered on time and with quality. The contributors are leaders in content strategy, and we are privileged that they agreed to be part of this project.
Val Swisher was an early contributor, and we want to especially acknowledge her significant contribution to the internationalization and localization terms.
This book would not be possible without the helpful assistance and good judgement of content strategy maven Laura Creekmore. In addition to contributing the term metadata, Laura’s work as Series Editor helped keep us sane, grounded in reality, and focused on the task at hand. We couldn’t have done it without her.
Thanks to Marc Posch, who created the cover design, which we are using for the entire content strategy book series, and to Tobias Anstett, Stefan Kleineikenscheidt, and the engineers at K15t Software, who provided the wiki we used to develop the book and the software that exported the DocBook XML we used for the print and eBook editions.
Thanks to Cheryl Landes who, in addition to contributing the term findability, created the index and to Murray Maloney, whose knowledge of publishing helped us as we created the book structure.
And thanks to Trey DeGrassi, who helped with a myriad of tasks, including creating the companion card deck, wrangling contributors, and helping us keep focused on our work.
Scott Abel & Rahel Anne Bailie, Editors