Single Sourcing

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Single sourcing is the use of the same content in different documents and in different forms. For example, a company may have a common set of instructions. Those instructions are written and placed in a database available to those who might need it. Then that source of instructions may be used in different documents and it may also be duplicated in different formats.

Having a single source reduces translation costs, maintenence costs, errors, and improves consistency. For, the company only has to write a piece of documentation once and will only have to update that one source file when needed.

The Society for Technical Communication defines single sourcing as "using a single document source to generate multiple types of document outputs; workflows for creating multiple outputs from a document or database source."

Here is a link to the STC's Single-Sourcing Special Interest Group.

An interesting book, Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation, written by Kurt Ament explains in detail what single sourcing is and how to develop single source documents. The link on Amazon.com's site allows you to read an excerpt of the book.

Single sourcing is the path that many large software companies, like IBM, are taking. It is definately an interesting topic and an interesting approach to information development and management.