What others are saying about the Taxonomy, continued
"Using Taxonomy codes has made searching easier and faster. We would be lost without it!"
-Betty Hanacek and Marioly Botero, United Way 211, Atlanta
"When Points of Light wanted to develop our own Taxonomy we found out who the expert was and it was AIRS and Georgia Sales, and together we were able to create a taxonomy for volunteer opportunities and volunteers within the AIRS/211 LA Taxonomy. This was one of the best partnerships I’ve experienced: Points of Light had the subject expertise and volunteer reviewers and Georgia had the encyclopedic knowledge of how to develop a taxonomy, and the framework of codes that saved us time, energy and effort."
—David Styers, Points of Light Foundation
The Taxonomy serves as the underlying structure for our Community Disaster Information System. We have found the Taxonomy to be the most comprehensive categorization of community-based resources for disaster preparedness and response."
—Douglas Troy, Professor, Miami University
"A well-structured and rich controlled vocabulary for human services."
—Dr Ali Shiri, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta
"The taxonomy would enhance open access to government as navigating through it is very intuitive and straightforward."
—Andrew LeFrancq, Ministry of Government Services, Ontario Government
"Like the Dewey Decimal System, the Taxonomy gives information and referral systems around the country a common structure for coding human services in their communities."
-Carol Davis, United Way of Connecticut/2-1-1 Infoline
"The AIRS/211 LA County Taxonomy is particularly helpful because of its flexibility. The five level system permits small and large organizations to index at the level best suited to their needs."
-Diane Gatto, United Way 211/First Call for Help, Cleveland
"As the health and human services field changes, so does the Taxonomy. The fact that the Taxonomy includes 'see also' and 'use references' is invaluable, as they make it easier to find the correct term and explore other options while indexing your database."
-Cathleen Kelly, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Mental Health Association of NYC
"As we confront process and technological challenges of merging databases, the Taxonomy has given us a common language to talk about services. It was an easy decision for us to adopt the Taxonomy as a cornerstone of how we will provide information about services in Nebraska."
-Nancy Shank, University of Nebraska Public Policy Center
"TAXONOMY is one of a small number of critical standards for bringing the field of I&R out of the shadows. Without a standard, there is no system. And without a system , we will never have the visibility we need to fulfill our mission. I urge you to use it."
-Gil Evans, Past President, AIRS
"The AIRS/211 LA County Taxonomy is one of the best examples of a highly detailed and precise taxonomy designed especially for information and referral (I&R) programs. We commend this taxonomy to I&R programs looking for good models."
"We appreciate the Taxonomy's precise structure and carefully worded and defined individual terms. We can't imagine managing our resource database without the Taxonomy.
- We've learned how to customize it to meet our own needs by deciding what level we want to index any given concept. Rather than using all of the nearly 7,000 service terms (not counting the additional 1,300 target terms), we've settled on a manageable core set of about 1,300 terms. And we use a fairly small set of target terms to focus the indexing more precisely when that's needed.
- If we can't figure out how to index a concept, we post a note to the AIRS Taxonomy Listserv and invariably get useful advice from other users. If it turns out that no appropriate Taxonomy term exists, one generally gets created and shared with us.
- When new updates are released to subscribers, we run a special utility that our software developer created to integrate new and changed terms into the Taxonomy embedded in our resource database.
- Best of all, we can focus our attention on keeping our resource data accurate and up-to-date rather than on maintaining the Taxonomy.
"Life is good for us with the AIRS/211 LA County Taxonomy!"
-Dick Manikowski, Detroit Public Library - TIP Service
