Multi-Sourcing has been the Holy Grail of the documentation industry for a generation. Simply put: information goes in the hopper, press button A and a good marketing document results. Press button B and you get a User Manual, and pressing C creates the getting started pamphlet that goes in the box with the product. The heart of multi-sourcing is content reuse.
Until the advent of SGML, content reuse was impractical. Until the advent of XML, content reuse was out of the reach of all but the largest organizations and institutions. In the last 30 years, tremendous advances have been made in content reuse technology to enable multi-sourcing of documents.
Whenever the notion of content reuse is raised, one hears the same kinds of objections voiced time and time again. These kinds of questions are entirely typical and a natural reaction to the concept of content management and reuse. Adopting an XML or other reuse system asks people who already know how to do something well to change their process and to adopt methods they do not know. The following FAQ6 address the four most common questions from seasoned designers:
| Q1 | How will XML help me to tailor my materials to meet the needs of my audience? |
| A1 | When you are creating training now, if you have a good, useful piece of content that speaks to the same point in another class - don't you copy and paste it in? If you could do this more often, and maintain the same quality of output, would you do it? We all do that, within the body of our own work, and sometimes from other authors, too. We use our own documents as source for reuse more because we are intimately familiar with them. We know we can find that great paragraph we used to describe that weird thingamajig. More seasoned authors annotate their own works with notes that help them find those good opportunities to reuse content. If we work with another designer who does the same for long enough, we can get so that we can read each other's notes and make more use of each others' work as reuse content. XML, in this sense, is like a common form of notes with which we annotate each others' work so that we can access it and reuse it, when that is be best thing to do. |
| Q2 | How can I leave out technical information in one document, but include it in another? |
| A2 | That gets to be something of a tool question. What are you authoring with? You may collect the entire content for a document, run through it, individualizing it for this instance, cleaning up any transitions and output the result. Instead of copying and pasting text between documents, you are attaching document objects to one another like a jigsaw puzzle. Pieces that work well consecutively have the right "shape" to fit together that way. They add up together, you edit them as needed and produce the finished product. |
| Q3 | What prevents this from resulting in documents that seem mechanized and impersonal? |
| A3 | This is not a machine imitation of human communication. This is human beings using a system of shortcuts to make their work easier and more productive. It certainly can sound mechanized and artificial, but it doesn't have to be so. When the same item or process is described identically in five different places in 4 different classes - is that mechanical or is it using repetition to reinforce? |
| Q4 | What about the shifting voices of the authors; won't that cause confusion? |
| A4 | Do you have more than one instructional designer on your staff now? Are your students confused by having to attend classes created by different people in isolation? When everyone else's work is more available and when opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing are facilitated by the system, instead of hampered by it, will not that help these different people find a more common voice. If you never sing in a choir, you never get the knack of singing like everyone else. |