ABSTRACT
Current single sourcing literature discusses taking pieces of text and assembling them into multiple documents and multiple output formats. However, it assumes that the output basically matches the documentation we have now. As has been evident throughout this book, I’m not discussing new ways of obtaining what we have now, but new ways of getting someplace else. The dynamic information that I’ve discussed throughout this book is not what technical communicators were taught in school, nor is it they writing the practice on the job, I realized this way back when I began writing this book. It may be closer to what cutting edge researchers in information retrieval and adaptive hypertext want to develop out of their work, but they seem to assume the content exists. I’m writing for the person who must create the content. Not the most glamorous job in the world and one that may take an even more unglamorous twist. The unglamorous part is the piecemeal development of content that will be required. A situation I (Albers, 2000) examined from the editing viewpoint and which Weiss (1993; 2002) has described as “contributing to the database stew” (p. 61) is that individual textual elements will need to be created and stored in a way that allows their eventual placement into many documents.
