The Documentation Elephant
http://www.stc-carolina.org/tiki-index.php?page=The+Documentation+Elephant

Albing, Bill, Michelle Corbin Nichols and Ann-Marie Grissino
Carolina Communique
2004

Abstract:

As technical writers, we work more online than ever before. We are beginning to work with documentation in a new way, so that we can repurpose content and free it from the restrictions imposed by any particular delivery mechanism. We no longer solely create paper-publishable documents. We do not, as yet, have a good word for what we do; we do not have a single word or phrase that summarizes the effort or the deliverables. Nor can we use any single existing lexicon because the concepts are new. This difficulty is a natural consequence of the inter-networked world in which we work, where information is delivered multiple ways for diverse audiences. But let us look at the phrases currently growing in popular usage that refer to this effort.