Identical vs derivative reuse
Posted on October 11, 2007
Category Best Practices, Information Architecture | 5 Comments
Reuse can bring many content benefits to an organization including increased productivity, reduced costs, greater consistency, more usable content. But is reuse really realistic? Don’t you need to modify content for the channel (e.g., web, print) or the audience (e.g., region, product).
When content is reused identically, it is reused without change. Derivative content is reused with change, content stays related to the original component.
Of course the answer is that it always depends, but one thing is certain, that companies can reuse more content then they think. Let’s look at each of these in turn:
The channel
Research shows that content designed for the web should be written differently then content for print. However, what is often not pointed out is that well written web content makes very good print content. The hallmarks of good web content; clear, precise, short, well-chunked also apply to print.
Yes, but what about look and feel? Content is written separate from format, a stylesheet is overlaid on the content ensuring that it is displayed in the most effective way for the channel.
OK, so what about the differences in detail (e.g., more detail in the print, less in the web)? These types of changes are handled with filtered reuse (content can be filtered out/removed when not appropriate for the channel). This means that you can write content in a building block approach (e.g., introduction is reused everywhere, subsequent detail is used in print) and the content that is appropriate for the channel is filtered out using stylesheets.
Audience
Content may have the same “message” but be intended for different audiences such as region, manager vs business analyst.
When the core content is the same but there are variations to accommodate something like different regions, filtered reuse is appropriate. Core content is written, then the variations for each of the regions is added and tagged with metadata to identify when the content is appropriate. Stylesheets filter out the inappropriate content at publishing.
When writing for different types of readers/users, style may be different. Ask yourself, do we need to “talk” to this audience differently from another? If the answer is yes, you probably need derivative reuse, but if the answer is no, you can often create core content for all audiences and filter out the differences (e.g., detail).
Caveat
One thing is important to understand, not all content can be reused identically. You never want to compromise the quality of the content in order to reuse it. Derivative or unique content is OK, just ensure that it doesn’t dominate your content set, rather it is an appropriate part of your content set.
Common percentages of reuse are:
- 15% identical
- 40% filtered
- 20% derivative
- 25% unique
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There’s another type of re-use that I don’t think I’ve seen addressed, and I can’t even think of a name for. Templated reuse? Stubbed reuse?
Say a company has a system for “stubbing out” contracts. It contains content items for the major clauses in a contract, and users can put those content items together to form the shell of a contract, which is then modified further for the specific situation.
In this case, the content should specifically NOT be linked to the source from which it came, for two reasons: (1) it’s going to be modified in each and every case it’s used, and (2) it’s a historical record. Once a contract is written, you don’t want it changing when the source template content changes.
In this sense, perhaps it’s called “disconnected reuse”? Once the content is place in another medium (the contract), it becomes disconnected from its source, never to reconnect.
Is there an accepted name for this type of reuse?
[...] a (short) post entitled Identical vs derivative reuse Ann Rockley suggests that “one thing is certain, that companies can reuse more content then [...]
Technologically speaking using XML can facilitate a great depth of re-use of content in the situations you outlined above through the ability to mark-up components of the content for specific channels. By tagging different pieces of the content for print, web or other organizations can keep one centralized copy of the content. The tagging can be done at any level of granularity so that sentences, paragraphs, images etc can all be centralized and re-used.
They can then use an XML content server like MarkLogic Server to deliver manage the content and deliver it to the various channels and formats.
Deanne wrote about the concept of reusing content which once reused can no longer be updated if the source (parent) content changes, then she asked what is this called.
We call this Severed Reuse. The content is reused, but once reused, the relationship to the source (parent) content is severed (broken). In one sense it is a little like copy and paste, but in the case of severed reuse, it is possible to see the history of where the component originated, but in copy/paste there is no indication of where content came from.
[...] Posted on March 11, 2008 by TanjaK Some time ago, the Rockley Blog talked about identical vs derivative reuse. “When content is reused identically, it is reused without change. Derivative content is [...]